TechRadar News

• Ministers are considering incentivizing vehicle-to-grid (V2G) tech
• It could allow carmakers to earn credits for installing V2G capabilities
• Critics say carmakers would produce more polluting cars as a result

UK ministers are reportedly considering giving manufacturers extra incentives to add vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology to cars as part of its review of the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate.

The technology, which was arguably pioneered by Nissan in Japan in the early 2010s, supports bidirectional power transfer, allowing electric vehicles to not only be charged from a domestic charger, but also feed energy back into the grid.

Early demonstrations with Japan’s CHAdeMO charging standard showed that something like a Nissan Leaf could provide power to a home during natural disasters, and also help decrease the load on the grid during peak consumption hours.

According to supporters of the technology, increasing the amount of V2G-enabled EVs on UK driveways could help the transition away from fossil fuels to renewables, balancing the grid when wind and solar generation is lower than electricity demand.

(Image credit: Nissan)

According to a report in The Guardian, in order to incentivize manufacturers, ministers are considering offering additional Zero Emission Vehicle credits to those companies that can successfully increase the prevalence of V2G tech.

Currently, the ZEV system sees manufacturers earn credits for every fully electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicle they register, with annual targets set for the percentage of electric cars sold each year.

Companies that fall short of their annual sales quota must either buy surplus credits from other manufacturers, borrow against future targets, or pay non-compliance penalties.

While increasing the amount of vehicles that are capable of bi-directional charging could indeed help balance out the grid in times of peak demand, some critics claim that offering additional credits to manufacturers could lead to an increase in the production of polluting petrol and diesel models.

“Vehicle to grid is exciting technology that could help balance the grid and cut bills, but carmakers should only be rewarded if it’s actually used, not just for fitting it,” Ben Nelmes, the chief executive of New AutoMotive, a think-tank tracking the transition to electric cars, told The Guardian.

Analysis: simplicity is key

(Image credit: Renault)

Vehicle-to-grid technology is nothing new, and the idea of the 'virtual powerplant', where the grid can give and take energy from thousands of vehicles all connected to the grid, has been on the minds of automotive manufactures for well over a decade.

Right now, Renault and Alpine offer V2G services in France through Mobilize and The Mobility House projects, while the Volkswagen Group's Elli sub-brand announced a packaged V2G offer in June for its German customers, targeting compatible VW, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles and Cupra models.

In the UK, Octopus Energy already offers its Power Pack, which it claims is the first vehicle-to-grid tariff that could save a typical V2G driver £620 per year compared to the company’s other flexible tariffs.

However, as someone who owns a house with EVs, solar, battery storage and inverters, I know first-hand just how complex it is navigating the various energy tariffs, and calculating whether or not it makes financial sense to sell excess solar back to the grid.

Not only does this typically require several apps and a good grasp on the software that manages all of the various systems, it also demands an in-depth knowledge of energy tariffs and dynamic pricing.

Vicky Edmonds, the chief executive of the Electric Vehicle Association England, which represents drivers, told The Guardian: “These technologies have enormous potential, but consumers are still getting to grips with more immediate questions around the cost of their car, the cost of charging, and whether an EV meets their day-to-day needs”.

So, while some believe that the electricity supplied by V2G cars could add up to the equivalent of a power station by 2030, the process would have to be as simple as possible to encourage already confused motorists to adopt the technology.

Amazon often likes to unveil a plethora of products at the same time, and it's done so again: we've got eight different product announcements to talk about today, and they cover smart displays, smart speakers, and the wider Amazon ecosystem.

Most of these products are available now, though some can only be preordered at the moment. Read on for all the details and pricing — at the time of writing international pricing is slowly rolling out, so we'll add that here as it gets announced.

1. Echo Dot

The new and improved Echo Dot (Image credit: Amazon)

The brand new Echo Dot — the speaker for "everywhere you can imagine" as Amazon puts it, from the kitchen to the living room — gets a host of upgrades. There's a new full-range driver here for improved audio and 50% more bass, the addition of a fourth microphone so it can hear you better, and room temperature detection.

There's some custom Amazon silicon inside in the form of the AZ3 chip, which should make Alexa+ faster and more responsive, and the smart speaker is now both a smart home hub as well as an Eero Wi-Fi extender. It's available now in Graphite, Glacier White, Agave Green, and Coral Pink for $99.99 / £94.99 / AU$199.

2. Amazon Kids Echo Dot

There's a new Echo Dot for your kids too (Image credit: Amazon)

If your kids are after their own Echo Dot, Amazon has you covered here too. There's everything you get in the regular Dot, with a choice of either Octopus and Penguin designs, and a year of Amazon Kids+ (featuring podcasts and audiobooks, usually $7.99 / £6.99 a month if you've got Prime). The Amazon Kids Echo Dot is yours for $109.99 / £104.99.

3. Echo Studio with Home Camera

The new Echo Studio comes with a camera (Image credit: Amazon)

The Echo Studio is the Echo speaker you go for if you want the best audio possible, and the newly unveiled model adds a feature called Advanced Room Adaptation that "tunes the sound to your space". There's also now Adaptive Volume, so audio adjusts as you move about the room to maintain a steady level.

Also — surprise! — there's now a camera embedded in the speaker. Amazon says you could use it to check in on pets or make sure you've switched the lights off. The camera can also be used with Alexa+, to get info on whatever you're holding, and with Fire TV devices if you want to put video calls on your television.

As always, you can turn off the camera whenever you like. The new Echo Studio with Home Camera is now available in Graphite for $249.99 / £239.99 / AU$479, and the existing Echo Studio (without the camera or extra audio features) remains on sale for $219.99.

4. Echo Time

The Echo Time is designed for the bedroom (Image credit: Amazon)

The Echo Time is a brand new smart speaker series from Amazon, and looks to be a more premium version of the existing Echo Spot. Yes, it's basically an Echo Dot with a clock on the front, but there's also smart alarm functionality here to wake you up at the best point during your sleep cycle, and routine settings for winding down at the end of the day too.

With a 3.2-inch touchscreen, you've got a bit of extra control when interacting with Alexa+ and other features, and Amazon says it's been specifically designed for the bedroom (there's no camera, you'll be pleased to know). The speaker is available now for $199.99 / £184.99 / AU$379, in Graphite, Glacier White, and Coral Pink.

5. Amazon Kids Echo Time

The Amazon Kids Echo Time has content curated for kids (Image credit: Amazon)

There's a kid-friendly version of the Echo Time available as well for $209.99 / £194.99, in either Galactic Grape or Cosmic Lime. As with the Echo Dot, the version for youngsters bundles in a year of Amazon Kids+ (usually $7.99 / £6.99 a month if you also subscribe to Prime), so there's lots of audio content to explore, plus wind-down content curated especially for kids.

6. Echo Show 16

The Echo Show 16 comes with or without a stand (Image credit: Amazon)

Amazon is going big with the Echo Show 16, which boasts a screen measuring 16 inches from corner to corner (as you may have guessed from the name). Amazon says its the "most advanced, versatile smart display" it's put out yet: there's a refined design, Fire TV functionality built in, and a choice of three new Screen Styles.

These Screen Styles are basically different widget layout options, focusing on smart home controls, displaying photos, or acting as a family organizer (with calendars front and center). The device is faster than previous Echo Shows, Amazon says, and the 13MP camera lets you use it as a security camera and video calling device too.

Amazon is opening up preorders for the Echo Show 16 now, and it'll be available "later this year". The standard smart display costs $499.99, while one with a special anti-glare Nanomatte layer (as used in the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro) is yours for $569.99.

7. Alexa Home Map

You can access the Alexa Home Map from multiple devices (Image credit: Amazon)

Alexa Home Map is exactly what it sounds like: a map of your home, rendered in 3D. The idea is you can see at a glance how your smart lights, speakers, displays, and cameras are set up, and control them with a tap on the map. You can start setting up the map through the Alexa+ app on your phone, though it's not rolling out until later this year.

8. Alexa Photo Frame

The Alexa Photo Frame is available in three finishes (Image credit: Amazon)

The Alexa Photo Frame tasks the Alexa AI with picking out the best shots from your Amazon Photos library, and displaying them on the 10-inch touchscreen — though you can also manually specify albums and people you want to see. New photos can show up automatically if you want, as they're added to your library.

Alexa is always on hand if you want to request a particular image, and you can even add voice notes to pictures and send them to friends and family with their own Alexa Photo Frames. The digital frame is available now for $199.99 in Black, and $229.00 with a real Birch or Walnut wood frame.

• Gartner report finds many firms aren't seeing benefits from AI
• Just 3% of businesses have hit their targets on AI
• This is despite many firms expecting AI technology to have a significant effect, and spending big to do so

New research has claimed barely any organizations are seeing real success when it comes to the results of heavily implementing AI in their workplace.

A report from Gartner found just 3% of organizations have hit their targets around productivity and efficiency, as well as trying to cut costs across their business using AI.

This is despite three quarters of leaders expecting AI technology to have a significant effect in their organization, with 85% set to spend more on AI in 2027, despite 38% of them already being over budget.

AI benefits to come?

"Ultimately, organizations will not generate cost savings from AI at this point," CV Viverito, senior director analyst for Gartner's HR practice, told attendees at the firm's HR Symposium.

"The greater opportunity is to use AI to do things that weren't possible before, such as shifting employee time into new capabilities, outcomes, and sources of growth."

Moving forward, Gartner says businesses should look to focus their AI efforts where the technology can make a tangible effect in key areas. It also advised organizations to spread AI knowledge across the business, with C-suite as important as entry-level workers when it comes to identifying new use cases and benefitting from such improvement.

“There isn’t a struggle to create capacity, that’s happening already as organizations redesign work,” claimed Viverito. “What organizations are struggling with is how to make that capacity usable and redirecting it to what is valuable.”

Gartner's report is the latest to urge caution when it comes to the possibilities of AI in organizations of all sizes.

A top economist recently warned AI is only helping the world's biggest technology firms - with most other large organizations yet to see any significant benefits, noting that, "Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."

Via The Register

The big headline in Apple news this week is the debut of a brand new MacBook Pro series with the M6 chipset. The brand has just refreshed its flagship laptops with a shiny new processor without hiking the prices, but these new machines still start at an eye-wateringly high $1,999.

If you're on more of a budget, then I'd highly recommend checking out the MacBook Air 13 (M5) for $1,099 (was $1,319) at B&H Photo today. Not only is this a great price for the latest MacBook Air 13, but it's one of the best deals I've seen since the laptop was hit by a massive price hike.

The record low for the MacBook Air 13 is technically $949, but it's been hovering anywhere between $1,299 and $1,149 ever since June. It's been a pretty bitter pill to swallow, considering the MacBook Air is arguably the best value MacBook for most people right now. With this deal, however, we're starting to creep closer to that pre-hike price tag.

MacBook Air 13 (M5) deal at B&H Photo

MacBook Air 13 (M5): was $1319 now $1099
Processor: Apple M5
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 512GB

The latest MacBook Air 13 hasn't been this cheap since Apple hiked up the price on its entry-level MacBook. If you're looking for a powerful, stylish, and portable machine, then the latest MacBook Air is an amazing choice. Not only do you get the fantastic M5 chipset here, but this particular configuration also features 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, ensuring plenty of space on the drive. View Deal

• See more: check out all of today's deals at B&H Photo

Overall, this is a great deal, and one that I wouldn't expect to go much lower over Black Friday. We're just about to hit the end-of-year sales madness, so you could wait it out to see if it drops any lower, but I doubt it will hit the rock-bottom prices we saw before the hikes took place. Annoyingly, component prices have hit both laptop and tablet prices really hard in recent months, with no end in sight.

For more details on this model, I'd highly recommend checking out our MacBook Air 13 M5 review. Overall, the latest MacBook Air 13 is more of an iterative upgrade, but it's still a fantastic machine — enough to score an impressive four and a half stars out of five, in fact.

• Samsung Galaxy Buds On cost $229, on sale November
• European price unconfirmed, will hit shelves some time in 2027
• That asking fee makes them some of the priciest new open earbuds

One of the biggest draws of the best open earbuds is that they're pretty inexpensive. The lack of ANC, fancy ear tips and oodles of in-ear-exclusive features means that the go-to picks generally cost no more than the best cheap earbuds.

Samsung disagrees. It unveiled its first open earbuds, called the Galaxy Buds On, at the start of the month, but only for the Korean market. However, the company has now revealed worldwide availability (while telling us about how its engineers made them), and there are some pieces of disappointing news.

Firstly, if you're in Europe, put your excitement on the backburner. The buds will only launch there (including, presumably, the UK) in 2027, so you can't arrange to try these any time soon. No world on an Australian release either.

If you live in the US, you can buy the earbuds from early November, so you won't have long to wait. But you might want to think about them for now, until the price drops (possibly during a key sales event?), because they cost a princely $229, which is about £170 or AU$340, but I imagine they'll cost a little more in those regions upon launch.

The price of open earbuds

(Image credit: Future)

The Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 Pro launched for $249 / £219 / AU$399 at the beginning of the year, which might make these open earbuds look like a budget alternative. But given how cheap and cheerful these buds tend to be, $229 is a significant sum.

To my knowledge, there are only two pairs of current open earbuds which cost more: the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds (2nd Gen), released in September for $299 / £299 / $449 and the Shokz Openfit Pro, which arrived in January toting ANC-like noise reduction, for $249.95 / £219 / AU$399. Bose clearly knows they're expensive, which is why it launched them alongside a cheaper alternative — and the Shokz set boast a feature very rarely seen in such designs.

Other than the Sony LinkBuds Clip, which sell for $229 / £180 / AU$329 (and which we weren't impressed with in our initial tests), I can't think of any open earbuds I've tested recently that come close to this in price.

Anything over $200 or thereabouts is a premium price for open earbuds, and I wouldn't blame you for thinking twice before buying them. Even Shokz, another segment leader, only charges $199 / £179 / AU$339 for its also-premium Shokz OpenDots 2.

And there are some fantastic options for less. The Soundcore AeroClip 2 , from a reliable brand, go for $169 / £159 (about AU$240). I've been using the Baseus Bowie MC2 for a few months, ever since publishing my review in August, and they cost just $79 / £89 (about AU$180). And other brands have loads of options too, like Soundpeats and Earfun, which also cost little.

As I said when I covered in influx of open-ears earlier this week, there isn't a huge difference in design, feature set or sound quality in any of these earbuds, which makes it really hard to justify splurging for a premium pair. You can get basically the same earbuds as the Galaxy Buds On for half the price, and I'd personally never spend more than about $120 on this kind of earbud.

Because of this, I was expecting the Galaxy Buds On to sell for less than the Galaxy Buds 4 ($179 / £159 / AU$299), and I'm really surprised that's not the case. If you're interested in this form factor, I'd recommend picking up a cheaper pair from a competitor, or waiting to see if they get discounts further down the line.

• Oracle co-CEO says workplace priorities could shift as AI picks up more and more work
• Oracle has already saved days in its recruitment business
• Will humans be replaced, or will they just have different work to do?

Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia has questioned how much of the work employees carry out today will actually be necessary in the future, with artificial intelligence not just speeding up some tasks, but fundamentally rewriting entire organizational processes.

Speaking on stage at the company's annual AI World conference, Sicilia suggested AI could "give people more time to be human," raising questions about the everyday tasks we've come to accept as just an integral part of our 9-5s.

"I think we should be questioning how much of the work we've come to accept today is actually necessary going forward," he declared.

AI will actually do the work – not just help you to do the work

Sicilia's comments come as the company unveils a new generation of AI-powered enterprise applications – with a big emphasis on agentic workloads that can take over many processes altogether.

Now that the world has entered the next stage of AI, where experimentation is largely behind us and real use cases are being laid out, Oracle predicts that AI could eliminate entire stages of work. The company's own recruiting team is using agentic AI to turn market research preparation into a 15-20-minute job – something that used to take two to four days.

As part of its latest announcements, Oracle has introduced new Claw-powered Fusion Agentic Applications designed to reason, analyze business data, simulate outcomes and carry out approved actions. Put simply, it marks an important point in AI's timeline with agents can identify scenarios or challenges, simulate next stages, and then carry the best one out.

Strategic Field Demand Planning stands out as a useful tool for stretched HR teams, predicting staffing requirements, identifying coverage gaps and handling adjustments. It's the sort of job that takes manual hours to do but detracts from direct revenue generation.

A separate Executive Briefing Document application can research a customer's history, company news and revenue potential to pull important information into one briefing pre-meeting. Again, another time-consuming administrative job that now frees up human hours to produce revenue-boosting work.

"This enables organizations to translate business objectives into growth opportunities, reliable service, and stronger customer trust," Applications Development SVP Kartik Raghavan wrote.

'More time to be human'

Sicilia's comments point toward a significant change in how businesses measure productivity in the future, and whether completing more work should necessarily mean spending more time on more work.

Ultimately, there's a big difference between just boosting productivity and automating entire workflows, and we're yet to see the latter in any meaningful scale, which means we don't yet know how companies will react to all that extra free time.

Job displacement is still an ongoing concern for many, but one of the core messages conveyed at AI World has been that companies need to totally rethink how they work – and advanced AI adopters could actually just end up having a different type of work for human employees.

"We're giving people more time to be human," Sicilia concluded on stage.

Early shoppers, get in here. Black Friday is officially over a month away, but Currys isn't waiting around until then to kick off its yearly mega-sale. Deals are live now, with savings of up to 40% available on 1,000s of items. I've picked out the 14 best offers, including my recommended deals on TVs, laptops, appliances, smart home tech, headphones, and so much more.

• Browse the full Currys Black Friday sale

Let's start with a regular favourite of mine: it's this Shark Stratos Cordless Vacuum for £199 (was £419.99). I picked up one of these many years ago, and it was one of the best investments I made to make cleaning around the home so much easier. With awesome suction power, an invaluable anti-hair wrap brush roll, and solid battery life, it's hard to argue against for under £200.

I also want to give a shoutout to the JBL Go 5 for £34 (was £39.99). This tiny Bluetooth speaker quickly became our top cheap pick here at TechRadar — and now it's even more affordable, so what's not to like? Get it for great audio quality, a tough build, and it's many funky colour options.

Check out all of my top picks below, or have a browse through all the major categories from the Currys Black Friday sale to see if anything else looks good to you. This is only a small selection of everything that will be available, so I'll be back to update our guide regularly with all the top new offers that are worth the cash.

And if you're worried about buying this early, then know that Currys has launched a Black Friday price guarantee as part of this sale. It means that if anything you purchase between now and November 24 is cheaper before December 1, then they will refund you the difference. Just make sure you register the details of your purchase so you can make a claim if needed.

Currys Black Friday sale — quick links

• Appliances: up to 40% off Bosch, LG & Miele
• Christmas: up to 40% off lights & decorations
• Fitness: up to £1,300 off exercise equipment
• Headphones: JBL & Samsung from £39.99
• Health & Beauty: up to 40% off Philips & Oral-B
• Kitchen: up to £250 off Ninja & Sage
• Laptops: up to £400 off
• Phones: up to £279 off Honor & Samsung
• TVs: from £129
• Vacuums: up to £150 off Dyson & Vax

Currys Black Friday sale — my top 14 deals

Stratos Cordless Vacuum Cleaner: was £419.99 now £199
Here's a fantastic saving on the appliance we awarded 4.5 stars out of five in our Shark Stratos Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner review. I can't praise these vacuums enough for the Anti Hair Wrap tech that's saved me so much time unclogging the brush roll compared to my old vacuum. Flexology makes it a good option for reaching under furniture, and this upgraded Stratos version boasts a duo clean brush roll and Clean Sense IQ that automatically adjusts suction power to tackle tougher areas of dirt. Battery life is an impressive 60 minutes, and you get handy pet tool accessories for free.View Deal

iO2 Electric Toothbrush: was £100 now £39
The iO range is usually a more expensive option in Oral-B's range of electric toothbrushes, but this is a decent deal on the entry-level option – although I have seen it for at least £5 cheaper in the past. It doesn't boast many high-end features, but it has the basic ones you really need to brush your teeth effectively and efficiently, including a two-minute timer, three brushing modes, and a visible pressure sensor. Plus, you get a bonus travel case and refill holder included for free.View Deal

6-in-1 DualZone XL Air Fryer: was £239.99 now £159.99
This is an updated version of the extremely popular and number one best-selling air fryer that we awarded five stars in our Ninja AF300UK review. Older models have been cheaper, but this is still an excellent price for a large dual-basket air fryer that can prepare multiple foods at once, faster and arguably healthier than other conventional cooking methods.View Deal

JBL's latest small speaker was released in summer 2026 and instantly became our new favorite cheap option. It comes in loads of colors, and is pretty much perfectly designed. The Go 5 is a small, tough, waterproof Bluetooth speaker. In our full JBL Go 5 review, we gave it five stars for simply being as good as Bluetooth speakers get when they're this small. View Deal

CX34 Chromebook Plus: was £499 now £399
Display - 14 inches
Processor - Intel Core i5
RAM - 8GB
Storage - 512GB

This version of the Asus Chromebook Plus is older now but it still offers a solid amount of power for the price. It includes 8GB of RAM and an Intel Core i5 processor, boosting performance, boot times, and load times. There's also a reasonable 512GB of storage for the price, and battery life is solid at up to 10 hours on a single charge. That's more than enough to last a full working day. At a little under £400, it's a smart buy for school or college, or just as a home laptop for light use and everyday tasks.View Deal

C6 65-inch OLED TV: was £2199 now £1699
LG reclaimed the top spot on our best TV guide with the C6, as it boasts fantastic overall picture quality and excellent all-around performance, making it the number one pick for most people's needs. Contrast is top-tier, with vivid colors and rich blacks, while motion is handled expertly. No matter if you're watching films, streaming TV shows, playing games, or watching sports, it's up to the job.View Deal

The Breville Barista Express is on par with some of the best espresso machines we've reviewed here at TechRadar. It has a higher learning curve than the average espresso machine, but it allows you to hone your coffee skills to make drinks exactly how you like them. This is just $50 more than the record-low price for the entry-level espresso maker and it remains a best-seller at Amazon, so it's looking like the right time for me to upgrade.View Deal

Tune 780NC: was £119 now £49.99
We were very impressed by these headphones in our review, with particular praise for the noise cancellation, lightweight build and battery life. With a huge price cut for Black Friday, they're even better value — and are surely the best way of stopping outside noise at this price. Given it's such a huge discount, I'd be surprised if they get any cheaper later this month.View Deal

Yoga Slim 7: was £1079 now £949
Display: 14 inch OLED
Processor: Intel Core Ultra 5
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 512GB

If display quality is just as important to you as power, then strongly consider this Lenovo Yoga deal at Currys. It comes with a top-end OLED screen that offers a clear and sharp image – whether you're working on documents or streaming your favourite TV shows. Specs are solid elsewhere, too, including a capable Intel Core Ultra 5 CPU and 16GB of RAM that ensure good overall performance.View Deal

A6S 50-inch 4K TV: was £319 now £299
If you're looking for a small-sized budget display, you can't get much better than this Hisense 50-inch 4K TV that's on sale for £299 at Currys — a record-low price. The Hisense A6S supports 4K Ultra HD resolution, an LED array for respectable brightness and contrast, and Dolby Vision HDR for superior colours. Access to all of your favourite streaming apps is just a button press away, too. All of this for a little under £300? Bargain.View Deal

V15 Detect Absolute: was £649 now £479
This is a solid discount on the Dyson V15 Detect. You get the same dirt detection and extra, laser-equipped head found in the cheaper V12 model, but also significantly more powerful suction (240AW) and a larger dust cup. Check out our Dyson V15 Detect review for more info and why we awarded it an impressive four and a half stars out of five.View Deal

Bravia 8 II 55-inch OLED TV: was £1999 now £1799
The latest version of Sony's Bravia 8 is an incredible OLED TV that boasts some of the best picture quality to date, according to our review. The display was only released this year and this is the biggest discount yet. Sure, it's still quite the investment, but you do get a picture quality that's bright, vivid, and detailed, with strong in-built sound as well. It's perhaps not the best pick for gamers, though, given it lacks some features compared to the competition.View Deal

Salon One-Step Hair Dryer & Volumiser: was £50 now £25
Always a hot item during holiday sales events, Currys has the best-selling Revlon One-Step hair dryer on sale for a record-low price of £25. Thanks to the unique oval brush design, the hairdryer delivers a salon-like blowout with brilliant shine and extra volume.View Deal

CR250 32-inch HD TV: was £139.99 now £129
I'll say upfront that you shouldn't expect a cinematic wonderland from an HD TV at this size and price (although it does support HDR, which is nice), but what I really rate here is that it's just a simple smart TV at a great price. The Roku interface is easy to use, intuitive, and supports all the key streaming services. So, if you want a small TV that does the job and has all the smart viewing options you could want to watch your favourite shows and movies, here it is.View Deal

• The UK Government has fired up a new 'Warm Homes Loan Scheme'
• It offers interest-free or low interest loans of up to £15,000 for solar or a battery, £20,000 for heat pumps or other renewable heating tech
• The cheap loans will benefit from an up-to-5% reduction in interest rates compared to regular loans, with up to 30 years to repay

The UK Government has announced a new 'Warm Homes Loan Scheme' designed to provide either interest-free or low interest loans for homeowners buying solar panels, a battery, or a heat pump (and other renewables besides).

The Guardian reports that energy suppliers such as British Gas and E.On have partnered with lenders (including Homeserve, Tandem Bank and The Money Co-op) to offer the loans.

Those wanting solar panels or a storage battery can get a loan of up to £15,000 (so up to £30,000 for a full system with both). An air-to-water heat pump (meaning one that uses your existing central heating radiators) qualifies for a loan of up to £20,000. Air-to-air heat pump loans go up to £10,000, and a loan for a ground-source heat pump runs up to £35,000.

Only some of these loans will be interest-free, but where interest is charged it'll be at a low level, the Government it has worked with lenders to deliver an "up-to-5% reduction in interest rates from regular loans offered by banks or high street lenders".

The Government also notes that the loan periods can be up to 30 years in some cases, and that "people can shop around for the one that works best".

As well as a loan, some homeowners will still be able to benefit from a grant for a heat pump of up to £9,000 under the current 'Boiler Upgrade Scheme' or BUS (for upgrading away from a fossil fuel heating system). There could be a catch here, though, which I'll come back to shortly.

The Government said: "We know demand for these technologies is soaring, with almost 150,000 solar panel installations in first six months of this year. Heat pump sales also reached a record high in 2025. Our loans will help thousands more households cut their energy bills quickly."

All loan-funded installations will use MCS-certified installers.

Analysis: new loans are welcome — but BUS grants are reportedly changing too

(Image credit: IKEA)

Any financial support for making the move to renewable energy is very welcome for obvious reasons. These systems can be very pricey, as I've found out first-hand — I recently had a solar panel and battery setup installed. If you want a sizeable array and a battery with a higher capacity, that doesn't come cheap, so a loan really helps — and the repayments are subsidized by the savings made on your electricity bill.

I live in Scotland, where I couldn't get a loan of this nature before now, and it's worth noting that this scheme is for the whole of the UK, so those in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can benefit.

What we don't know yet is how many of the loans will be interest-free, as obviously that's the ideal proposition — presumably those will be the shorter-term financing arrangements.

For the low-interest loans, the Government gives an example of a homeowner borrowing £10,000 at 8% over seven years, where the expected repayment would be about £155 per month. With the new loan scheme, we're told they'd save "up to £285 a year on repayments", so they'd be repaying more like £130 per month.

The Government estimates that installing a heat pump, solar panels and battery could help a household save up to £550 per year on energy bills — and with solar export (which is plentiful in the summer), £300 more can be saved. I'd say those figures were right based on my experience (with just solar and battery), and this money offsets the cost of the loan as already noted.

What about the potential catch for the 'Boiler Upgrade Scheme' grant that I mentioned? Apparently in today's budget, chancellor John Healey is reportedly going to scale back these heat pump grants, with hundreds of millions of pounds of potential funding to be cut from its £2.7 billion five-year budget.

Currently a grant typically provides £7,500 towards the cost of a heat pump, but it's viewed dimly as a subsidy mostly used by middle-class homes. The Guardian tells us that the Government is likely to switch to offer the mentioned up to £9,000 grants, but crucially these are supposedly going to be for households in remote areas not connected to the gas network. The idea will be to help those homes transition from very expensive oil heating systems to a heat pump.

Meanwhile, for those not looking at a larger investment in renewables, whether loan-funded or not, plug-in solar remains a fresh and much more affordable option than a full solar install.

• GMO warned customers to back up data, disconnect devices, and shut down systems after a cyberattack
• Attackers allegedly stole customer data, leaked information, and threatened ransomware deployment
• Compromised trading-platform credentials and reports of unauthorized transactions raised concerns for affected users

Japanese internet giant GMO Group has told its customers to scan their computers for viruses, back up all of their data, disconnect the devices from the internet and then shut them down.

The announcement, which literally told customers, “unplug any cords connected to your PC," was made in response to a cyberattack it recently suffered, as well as the threats then made by the malicious actors.

GMO Group gets hit

GMO Internet Group is a large Japanese technology conglomerate whose business spans internet infrastructure, cybersecurity, online advertising, financial services, and more. It brings in billions of dollars every year, and operates a broad portfolio of subsidiaries, among which is Onamae Desktop Cloud, a popular VPS service provider.

Its main customers seem to be individual retail forex (FX) traders in Japan who run automated trading software. It provides a rented Windows desktop hosted on GMO’s servers, allowing customers to keep trading applications running, while being able to shut down their own computers.

On October 20, 2026, the company disclosed having suffered a cyberattack in which threat actors installed malware on some customer environments. Apparently, up to 26,739 servers were at risk, and the company responded by progressively shutting them down, launching an investigation, and cleaning them up.

“We have confirmed that unauthorized access by a third party occurred against Onamae.com Desktop Cloud and that unauthorized programs were installed in some customers’ server environments,” the company said at the time.

The investigation determined that the attackers walked away with sensitive customer data, although it wasn’t said how many customers were compromised, or what types of information were taken. It was also later reported that the unnamed attackers were demanding roughly $50 million in ransom, in exchange for deleting the data. They threatened to release the data on the dark web if the demands aren’t met. Onamae said it wouldn’t pay the attackers, and the data eventually did leak.

Despite the data leaking, no known entities claimed responsibility for the attack.

Condolences money

The attackers also threatened to install ransomware on devices belonging to Onamae customers, triggering the warning and the call for everyone to shut down and unplug their devices:

“1. Request for a full scan of your own device for virus checks 2. Request for backup 3. Request to disconnect network and power from customer PC. Before 12:00 PM on Tuesday, October 27make sure to back up, disconnect the network, turn off the power, and unplug any cords connected to your PC,” the warning, machine-translated from Japanese, reads.

It seems the attackers never acted on their threat, since no ransomware was found on customer servers.

Onamae said it would not pay the attackers, but would instead compensate each customer $30 for their troubles, regardless or not if they actually suffered any damage or not. Those that suffered more meaningful damage will be compensated separately, it was said. Replacement computers were also offered, BleepingComputer reports.

The company has continued its investigation of the attack and is currently analyzing the leaked data to see how many customers were affected, and what is at risk. It also warned the public and the media not to share the leaked information, threatening legal information against those who do.

In one of the updates, Onamae said login credentials and some account details from users of trading platforms MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 were compromised. “Some customers have reported transactions in their trading accounts that they do not recognize,” it added, before urging customers to reset their passwords and terminate all active sessions.

The full scope of the attack, as well as material damages (which might be substantial), are yet to be seen.

Via BleepingComputer

• Data center developers could be required to invest in local communities as part of new UK government plans for an AI "covenant"
• This could come in the form of payments to residents or investment plans for local infrastructure
• Multiple sites in AI Growth Zones have seen widespread opposition over fears that the data centers don't offer enough benefit for local residents

The UK is attempting to position itself as a world-leader in AI technology, but a data center buildout is a necessary step in realizing that ambition and those living in the immediate vicinity of planned sites aren’t too happy.

In an effort to reduce the dissatisfaction of local communities, the UK government is considering setting a list of criteria a developer must meet to have a data center approved for construction.

The current list of criteria include investments in local communities, as well as meeting sustainability requirements and set agreements on energy use as part of an AI “covenant” with the British public.

British AI to be “distinctly Labour”

The current buildout of AI data centers in the UK has been fraught with delays in planning processes, a significant backlog of grid connections, and bottlenecks in hardware and cabling.

Microsoft recently pulled out of residency plans at the UK’s largest planned data center after learning the facility would not be connected to the grid until the early 2030s.

UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan has said developers should be “able to build British infrastructure, especially in areas like AI that are driving growth and creating revenue for public services.”

Data center developers who meet the “covenant” could be given priority access to power grids and fast-tracked planning approval, helping to secure funding for local areas while also helping to meet the UK’s AI goals. While no solid plans exist for how this investment could look, it could involve contributions to local infrastructure or payments to residents.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Narayan said that the government would not let the AI buildout purely serve “foreign firms and foreign billionaires,” adding that the government would seek a “distinctly Labour approach to British AI” that would help better serve the British public.

Several areas of the UK have been designated as AI Growth Zones by the UK government, providing developers with preferential energy rates in regions with excess - such as areas with strong renewable energy generation - while also allowing local authorities to keep 100% of the additional business rates generated by new developments.

AI buildout isn’t all sunshine and roses

The proposed AI “covenant” isn’t purely out of the goodwill of the British government. There has been significant opposition to data centers across the UK.

One data center planned to be built in Auchertool in Fife, Scotland, has attracted over 1,600 objections. The site - with a 600MW capacity - would be the second largest in the world once operational. The Scottish Parliament also backed a de facto moratorium on hyperscale data centers in September.

Similar plans for a 450MW data center on a former factory site in North Wales are being opposed by local residents and an online petition that has exceeded 26,000 signatures. The campus would occupy a brownfield site that has been derelict since 2008, but locals say the plans for the data center do not include clear and sustainable benefit for residents.

We’re not there yet, but mainly thanks to PDFs, we’re slowly making our way towards a paperless society. But how do you sign a document without actually touching a physical piece of paper? One solution is to use an online digital service like Nitro.

Available for Windows and Mac, there’s also a version of the PDF editor app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. But how does the latest version measure up to the best PDF editor software we've used? We put it to the test.

Nitro PDF: Pricing & plans

• Two subscription plans for small business and enterprise
• Three-year license also available

You can check out Nitro by clicking here.

Nitro PDF is the core offering, available for individuals, small businesses, and enterprise depending on one of two plans you choose. Prices start at $15 or £11.50 each month, billed annually. However, a three-year license option is also available - Nitro PDF Classic is priced at $270 or £200.

Nitro Sign is the second option, designed for those who just need basic e-signature features, and that costs $10 or £7.50 each month.

Higher end tiers for PDF editing are also available but they’re more of a bespoke custom tailored option. These are known as Nitro Sign Plus, Nitro Sign Enterprise, and Nitro PDF Plus, but you’ll need to contact their sales team to get a bespoke custom tailored price for them.

• Pricing: 4/5

Nitro PDF: Interface & experience

(Image credit: Nitro // Future)

• The page layout is clear and easy to navigate
• Each tool has a prominent area to click on to activate it

Having logged in (yes you do need to give Nitro your email address), you’ll be graced with the service’s dashboard. I was pleasantly surprised you can download software for Windows, macOS, and iOS, although you’re not given much information regarding its system requirements. I had to search online for it (it's here).

But interesting though this is, I’m more curious about the online service. Not only would this allow me to work with PDFs on any machine I care to log in from, but the web-based version always includes the latest available tools.

The web page is clean and simple. Beneath the links to download the various versions are all the available tools. You have “Smart Tools” where complex algorithms analyse the document for you.

This includes ‘Nitro Assistant’ which can summarise or even translate a PDF, and includes live conversations with an LLM. ‘Table Extract’ converts tabular data into an excel file, and ‘Form Extract’ does the same, but focuses on form data, ie, it extracts names, dates, addresses, and more from a PDF.

The ‘Convert PDFs’ category lets you turn any Microsoft Office document into a PDF, or a PDF into one of the three Microsoft Office formats, as well as turning it into a JPG. The last two on the list are what we were originally here for: signing PDFs and requesting others to do the same.

• Interface & experience: 4/5

Nitro PDF: Tools

(Image credit: Nitro // Future)

• Relatively simple to use
• Interesting AI tools that work well and save time

I do appreciate that not only can you upload a file from your computer simply by dragging it onto the right part of the page, but Nitro can link up to your online storage account, be it Dropbox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, Box or SharePoint, giving you a lot of flexibility.

I thought I’d try the summarisation tool first, but it turns out, I didn’t need to do anything: the moment I uploaded a file to the ‘Nitro Assistant’, the algorithm started working right away and after a few seconds, provided me with a summary. Since I’d written the original, I could tell it actually did a decent job of finding the key points, and providing a suitable synopsis.

Interestingly, the ‘Convert’ and ‘Optimise’ options are there in ‘Assistant’, so there would be no need to select their respective separate tools in the Dashboard: you can do it all straight from ‘Assistant’.

‘Table Extract’ was more interesting than I expected. I uploaded an article that contained copy as well as a couple of tables, and the algorithm was able to locate those, tell me which pages they were from, and grab the information from them.

Unfortunately it wasn’t perfect: a couple of cells were merged into one, it didn’t realise a table spanned two pages, and only gave me the data from the first. Given that there were only 2 rows on the second page, that wasn’t a major problem.

Just to be sure, I then tried the service with documents made up entirely of tables, spanning multiple pages. ‘Table Extract’ grabbed every single row each time. So when the PDF is obviously a table, the result is faultless, but when it’s interspersed with paragraphs and images, it could be a little tricky. As always, your mileage may vary.

Considering many similar services charge you credits to use what they call AI, the fact Nitro did all this without additional charge is a big plus for this service.

• Tools: 4/5

Nitro PDF: Signing

(Image credit: Nitro // Future)

• Simple and straightforward to set up e-signature collection
• Nitro handles everything in the background for you

As is similar with other tools in Nitro’s arsenal, choosing one signing tool actually gives you direct access to the other. Whether you choose ‘Request Signatures’ or ‘Self Sign’, you’ll have access to both, making the interface once again needlessly complicated with redundant buttons.

Despite this, the process is remarkably simple. You’re selected as the default recipient, and you get to drag specific fields onto the PDF document for you to fill in. There’s a button you can click on for the algorithm to detect existing fields, but it’s in beta, so if you want to be sure, just drag the relevant fields yourself.

When it comes to signing, you can draw using your trackpad or mouse (which didn’t work for me, even using different browsers), type in your name (Nitro uses a single script font for that, you don’t get a choice on that front), or you can upload a JPG, PNG or TIFF file bearing your signature.

Other fields include requests for the date, name, initials, checkboxes, even a custom field is available, enabling you to populate the form with all the information you require, including the option of making any or all of them compulsory.

It’s also possible to set a signing order, so a recipient will only be informed they need to sign once another, or others, have already done their bit. Best of all, those recipients don’t even need to create an account to do so. Nitro handles everything and will contact you once the document is completed.

The entire process was incredibly simple and well handled, and once the ‘detect fields’ button is out of beta, it’ll be even more effortless.

• Signing: 4/5

Should I buy Nitro PDF?

(Image credit: Nitro // Future)Buy it if...

You need to access and sign a lot of PDFs, would benefit from converting these files into other documents, and appreciate a little computer help to summarise a document.

Don't buy it if...

You don’t need AI to do the work for you, can already convert documents into PDF and back again, would rather not have another subscription, and prefer to print documents to sign them anyway.

Nitro // FutureNitro // FutureNitro // FutureNitro // FutureAlternatives

Adobe Acrobat Standard
The original remains, in our opinion, the top choice for best PDF editor out there. It's rich with features and tools for editing, converting, and organizing all your PDF documents. The workflow and user experience is sublime once you get past the initially overwhelming interface. In our review, we couldn't help but not that "sometimes, the best solution on the market has its reputation for a reason."View Deal

Foxit PDF Editor
"Manipulate PDFs in style with a great multi-platform PDF editor" was how we kicked off our review of Foxit's excellent PDF editor. It's packed full of powerful tools, including an outstanding data redaction tool. Ultimately, we found it to be "a great app for businesses who need to manipulate, edit, redact and otherwise alter PDFs on a regular basis."View Deal

EaseUS PDF Editor
EaseUS PDF Editor offers much of what Nitro does, although you have the choice of a perpetual license or taking out a subscription. When we tested the product, we found "a powerful, PC-only PDF editing software tool that allows you to manipulate and alter documents with relative ease. It also comes with more standard features, such as a converter, and has good OCR capabilities."View Deal

How I tested Nitro PDF

As this is mainly an online service, I checked it out on a couple of web browsers, namely, Firefox and Safari. All the tools worked great, aside from the drawing function for the signature which failed for both. Thankfully there were other ways to sign a document.

One of the good things of an online service is it’s not dependent on your computer’s specs, so you most definitely don’t need the latest and greatest to run Nitro PDF. In fact, I used a machine over 7 years old for this and it worked without a hitch.

Everything ran smoothly (aside form the drawing part) and I had no problem finding my way around.

For additional PDF editing software, we reviewed the best Adobe Acrobat alternatives and best free PDF editors.

UK marketers are entering a decisive phase. Digital advertising investment continues to grow, retail media and connected TV are becoming more central to media plans, and artificial intelligence is moving from experimentation into everyday campaign operations. Yet, the basic commercial question has not changed. Can marketers prove that each pound spent is generating measurable value?

That question is becoming more urgent than ever. IAB UK has forecast digital ad spend to reach £45 billion this year, with mobile accounting for over two thirds of such spend and online retail media emerging as one of the fastest-growing channels. The same research points to measurement fragmentation as a major industry concern, while AI and automation are now reshaping how campaigns are planned, bought, and optimized.

For UK businesses, the opportunity is significant, but so is the risk. AI can accelerate decision-making, personalize creative, optimize bids, and expose new pockets of demand. But if the underlying measurement framework is weak, AI does not solve the problem; it simply scales it. A model trained on incomplete, inconsistent, or poorly governed data can produce confident recommendations that move budget in the wrong direction faster than a human team can intervene.

The mobile blueprint for better measurement

This is why the mobile measurement playbook matters. Mobile advertising was forced to confront privacy constraints, fraud, cross-platform identity, and signal loss earlier and more intensely than most other channels. The result was a more disciplined approach to attribution. Cleaner signals, stronger validation, privacy-safe methodologies, and a willingness to combine deterministic, probabilistic, and referrer-based approaches depending on the quality of the available data.

Those principles now need to be distilled across the whole UK media mix. Retail media may sit closer to the point of purchase, but it still needs transparent standards if brands are to compare outcomes fairly across networks. Connected TV, for example, offers premium, brand-safe environments.

However, advertisers continue to struggle with fragmented measurement and the link between exposure and sales. Social, search, display and commerce media all produce valuable signals, yet too often those signals remain trapped in channel-specific reporting structures.

The cost of measurement blind spots

The commercial consequence is underinvestment. When marketers cannot connect exposure to outcomes with confidence, they hold back from channels that may be profitable.

Research we undertook recently with EMARKETER found that nearly six-in-ten (58.6%) marketers believe their organizations are likely underinvesting in profitable channels because those channels require better measurement. These results are highly relevant to the UK, where media fragmentation, privacy regulation and economic pressure combine to make every budget decision more scrutinized.

In this environment, marketers need to treat measurement as infrastructure, not as a reporting layer added after campaigns have run. That means aligning definitions across teams, removing data silos, validating traffic quality, establishing privacy-compliant identity and enrichment processes, and measuring incrementality rather than relying solely on last-click or platform-reported attribution.

AI raises the stakes

AI makes this shift more urgent. As new AI agents and tools move across ad workflows, from creative production and audience selection to bid optimization and campaign analysis, they are squeezing advertisers already under pressure to prove ROI. Our research showed that almost half of organizations (49.7%) said they were under significant pressure to demonstrate clear ROI across all channels, while a further 29.9% reported extreme pressure.

That creates a new accountability challenge. Marketers must understand not only what an AI system recommends, but also whether the data feeding it is trustworthy. That trust gap is already showing up in how marketers use AI. Poor data quality, driven by fragmented, incomplete, or unreliable signals, was the top-cited barrier to extracting more value from AI in the marketing stack, cited by 22.3% of respondents. Explainability, or the difficulty of validating what AI is doing, came second at 17.8%.

In practical terms, AI-ready marketing data needs to be clean, deduplicated, consented, connected, and governed. If customer interactions across app, web, retail media, CTV, and CRM cannot be stitched together responsibly, AI will optimize against a partial view of the customer journey. That may improve a platform-level metric but likely weaken overall business performance.

What marketing leaders should do next

Firstly, marketers need to define measurement standards before scaling AI investment. Marketers should agree which outcomes matter, how they will be attributed, where incrementality testing is needed and which data sources are approved for optimization. Otherwise, AI risks becoming a more sophisticated way to chase inconsistent KPIs.

Next, brands should assess partners on transparency. Publishers, retail media networks, ad tech vendors, and agencies need to explain how they validate signals, reduce fraud, manage privacy constraints, and connect upper-funnel activity to commercial outcomes. In a market where regulatory change and economic uncertainty continue to shape planning cycles, vague measurement promises are no longer enough.

Thirdly, marketers should maintain human oversight where decisions carry material commercial risk. Automation can improve speed, but human judgement remains essential when interpreting anomalies, challenging assumptions and deciding whether a recommendation fits broader business strategy. The goal is not to slow AI down, but to ensure it is acting on the right evidence.

Finally, UK marketers should look to mobile as a model for resilience. Mobile measurement evolved in response to privacy limits, signal loss, multiple app stores, device fragmentation, and fraud. Those conditions now describe modern digital advertising. The channels may differ, but the underlying challenge is the same: measure accurately when the environment limits what can be seen.

The blueprint for accountable growth

The next phase of growth in UK digital advertising will not be won simply by adopting more AI tools or shifting more spend into emerging channels. It will be won by the businesses that can prove what works, understand why it works and act on that insight quickly. Mobile-grade measurement provides a practical blueprint: privacy-safe, fraud-aware, cross-channel and built for imperfect data.

The message is clear. AI may transform marketing execution, but measurement will determine whether that transformation creates significant value. With budgets under scrutiny and digital media becoming more complex, the brands that build stronger measurement foundations now will be best placed to turn automation into accountable growth.

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In recent weeks, we have seen eye-watering amounts of personal data exposed by criminal actors, in an attempt to either extort organizations for ransom payments or sell the information for financial gain.

In the UK, three major airports suffered data breaches that exposed information relating to nearly nine million people. In the fintech sector, Revolut mistakenly disclosed a wealth of customer data to scammers impersonating government officials.

While in North America, hackers reportedly offered scans of nearly 153 million US and Canadian driving licenses for sale on the dark web.

These incidents highlight the risks and vulnerabilities organizations face when they accumulate and retain large volumes of valuable personal data.

Beyond the obvious need for greater internet security and protection against AI related attacks or synthetic identities, it raises one other fundamental question: do companies really need to collect and retain so much personal data?

More data, more risk

Identity checks can typically involve companies collecting names, dates of birth, addresses, document scans and facial images. That data is then stored, and may be copied across different suppliers and systems in the hope that existing security protocols stay robust.

As a result, organizations may unintentionally be creating honeypots. If breached, this data could be used to facilitate a variety of illicit activities such as fraud, impersonation and social engineering. The more information an organization collects, the more places it is creating data exposure risks.

Data accumulation thus significantly increases a company’s security risk. As data’s value increases, breaches are becoming more lucrative for attackers and more catastrophic for businesses. As AI tools continue to become commoditized and easier to use, breaches may become even more frequent unless we find new ways to verify legitimate information without a person’s entire underlying dataset being at risk.

Verification doesn’t require lots of data

Many of the free online services we use everyday are at risk from disruption because they fundamentally ask for too much data. These services do not need to know 10+ pieces of personal information about an individual - yet, because this is still collected, the internet’s overall business model is vulnerable.

Authentication primitives that preserve privacy can offer a way forward, helping to protect the future of the internet. They enable people to access free content and services without revealing unnecessary personal details. For example, an age-gated service may only need proof that someone is above a minimum age requirement, or a government service may only need confirmation of residency.

All of these core aspects can be verified without needing to access and store someone’s full dataset. The only necessity is asking the right questions at the right time – in a way that ensures what needs to be verified is in fact legitimate.

Data minimization can therefore become a security control and risk mitigation tool. The less information a service collects and retains, the smaller the attack surface for illicit actors. By asking only for the information needed at a particular moment, organizations can attest what matters without creating an unnecessary, high-risk store of personal data.

Prove the fact: keep the details private

Modern zero-knowledge cryptography can help address this challenge. It enables individuals to optionally store digital credentials via information from physical, chip-enabled ID cards or government digital identities like mobile driver’s licenses through an app, without making it accessible to third parties.

An individual can then use their digital ID to prove things like age, nationality and unique document ownership without revealing their identity or giving that data to a third party. Zero-knowledge cryptography can verify these claims while keeping the original information private.

When proof generation takes place on the individual’s device, sensitive information can remain local while the receiving service gets the proof it needs. Holding less reusable identity data can limit what an attacker obtains if that service is breached.

Preserving privacy: why this matters

Beyond the security benefits outlined, reducing data retention will also become essential as AI makes it harder for us to distinguish what’s real, and what data to trust. At the same time, advances in computing power could mean that private data encrypted well today could be harvested and decrypted easily in a post-quantum future.

Zero-knowledge proofs are not the finished article, but this should form a key part of a broader shift to cryptographic systems that is going to be fundamental to how we verify real information it can trust, and prepares companies for threats that were barely conceivable a decade ago.

In a world where both personal data is becoming more valuable, harder to trust and secure, holding less will become one of the most essential security measures.

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Planet Zoo 2 is the sequel to 2020’s zoo-building management sim. And it’s crammed with more animals, scenery items, and game modes than ever, so you can really let your creativity run wild.

Building zoos is my happy place. Life is stressful, the cost of living is shocking, and politics is so absurd I often feel like I’m being doped with increasing levels of satire to make the world’s first irony-immune man. Playing games like Planet Zoo 2 lets me spend time in a simpler world, where I can spend five hours tweaking the placement of ferns and rocks to make simulated siamangs happy.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time playing the original Planet Zoo. More than a lot, actually. Over 1,100 hours. That’s more than 45 days straight — a fact that makes me feel slightly queasy about my priorities in life. I’ve spent more time experiencing its highs and dealing with its limitations than I’ve spent with my extended family. So, naturally, as soon as I heard Planet Zoo 2 was in development, I knew I had to be the person to put it through its paces.

With the addition of aquariums, aviaries, wildlife reserves and more besides, I couldn’t wait to get my teeth into the new game and see what it was capable of. Even if it meant jettisoning a thousand hours of work, binning my old zoo and starting building from scratch, I was eager to see how all the new tools and content upgraded play. So are the two games birds of a feather, or is Planet Zoo 2 of a different stripe entirely?

Wings, fins and fur

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)Best bit

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Without a doubt, aquariums are my favorite new feature. Not only can you add a fantastic variety of undersea beasties, but you can also decorate tanks with rich-looking reefs, with everything from fronds of seaweed to brightly colored corals.

As a bit (okay, a lot) of a Planet Zoo nerd, when Planet Zoo 2 was announced, I had plenty of things on my mental wishlist of upgrades I’d like to see. But top of my list were the addition of both flying birds and fish, two types of critters that felt conspicuous in their absence from the huge roster of DLCs released for the original game. So honestly, it was pretty pleasing to see both of these kinds of exhibits included when previews of the game dropped.

Flat out my favorite addition has been aquariums. These new piscine enclosures are as pretty as a picture. Aquariums feel really versatile, whether you want huge open-air tanks or to build a wall of fish into your restaurant. Walkthrough tunnels make creating immersive exhibits a breeze, and the need to filter habitats separately depending on whether they require fresh, brackish, or salty water adds an extra layer of — excuse the pun — depth.

Underwater decorations also look fantastic, allowing you to create really richly colored coral reefs and rafts of seaweed and grasses. But naturally, the animals in Planet Zoo are the stars of the show, and there’s a huge variety of sea life on offer to populate your tanks, whether you’re looking for sharks, rays, turtles or schools of fish. Wisely, Frontier has steered away from including many sea mammals like whales and dolphins — a sensible decision in light of the increasing attention that’s been paid to the ethics of keeping highly intelligent, social mammals in small tanks — but the game does include manatees, and there’s still huge potential here for semi-aquatic mammals like seals and walruses.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Leading up to Planet Zoo 2’s release, I was particularly excited about the addition of flying birds, as this adds a whole new dimension to your habitats compared to flightless fowl like ostriches and emus. While aviaries — essentially roof support poles and netting sitting over a classic habitat — don’t feel quite as fresh an experience as creating aquariums, I can still see how I’ll be able to use them to create stunning enclosures. And the variety of feathered friends already on offer is decent, adding everything from toucans to brightly colored long-tailed parakeets.

In fact, animals in general have had a definite glow-up in Planet Zoo 2. Not only have the earliest, lower-definition critters from the base game, like lions and African elephants, received new meshes to bring them in line with sleeker-looking critters from later expansion packs, but fauna in general looks stunning in this game.

There’s also a really solid variety of animals on offer at launch, from gila monsters to giant pandas. Don’t get me wrong: some of my personal favorites from the original game and expansions still aren’t here. Frankly, any zoo that doesn’t have fennec foxes in it is not a zoo I want to spend time in. But all the classics are here, with just enough funky additions — Goodfellow’s tree-kangaroo, anyone? — that I’m already pretty jazzed about additions that might be coming up with future updates.

All told, the variety offered by Planet Zoo 2 makes creating diverse, vibrant zoos feel easier than ever.

Management material

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Given that Frontier Developments has launched two more park management games — Planet Coaster 2 and Jurassic World Evolution 3 — in the almost seven years since the OG Planet Zoo’s release, its core gameplay loop has inevitably evolved.

First off, career mode feels the most well-rounded it’s been in a Planet game to date. While you’ve always been able to dip in and out of individual missions on the map to complete objectives and pick up bronze, silver, and gold medals, the progression between them feels increasingly organic.

Functioning as an extended tutorial, career mode leads you through a variety of maps and scenarios throughout the world. As you complete bronze medals at each zoo, you’ll learn new mechanisms and unlock new accreditation tiers, in turn granting you access to higher tiers of animals. While this does mean your progression is somewhat locked to missions, the non-linear connection between maps made me feel much freer to pop in and out of maps than past games.

A big part of this is down to the addition of wildlife reserves. Releasing animals was a relatively shallow mechanic in Planet Zoo — enabling you to offload unneeded creatures in return for dollars or Conservation Points — in its sequel, this has been spun out into a sub-game in its own right.

Wildlife reserves’ core gameplay loop is pretty straightforward. When you arrive in a new reserve, you’ll create ecosystems for released animals by painting one in the landscape, clearing any invasive plant species, and balancing the terrain and plant requirements. Once it’s ready, you’ll be required to release animals from your zoos of the compatible type, balancing the ecosystem, and place research items like camera traps and acoustic monitors to unlock higher levels of research in your zoos.

I’ll be honest here: wildlife reserves are the area that I feel both sound like the most transformative on paper and yet haven’t fully clicked for me in practice. Part of this is because they rely heavily on my least favorite tool: the terrain painter — more on that shortly.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

But it’s also just because these mechanics feel relatively shallow. These reserves don’t really require much ongoing management, and given there’s not much more detailed interplay among the flora and fauna once it’s placed, you can basically just set and forget these areas. As a result, I often found myself just rushing to establish ecosystems and dump the required animals in them so I could return to meatier zoo management. I’m hoping that the more I play with them, the more I’ll find to love about these freer locations, but so far they’ve stood out the least to me.

One other factor that's occasionally caused me slight discomfort is the presence of bugs. No, I'm not talking about those tarantula exhibits: at release, there have definitely been some odd issues creeping in.

I've encountered nothing game-breaking, just slightly hinky behavior here and there. At one point, items I was meticulously placing using the advanced move tools would randomly jump to a different position once I clicked place. Meanwhile, I've experienced several well-documented issues where animals ghost through their bars or get boxed up en masse inside their habitats for no clear reason. Fair play to Frontier Developments, though: they promised to patch these issues pretty quickly and, at the time of publishing, I think all of these issues have been fixed.

If you're wanting a freer experience than career mode can offer, Planet Zoo 2 still has all the other game modes you loved from the original. Franchise mode lets you focus on building your global zoo network from scratch as always, adding the ability to create your own wildlife reserves to help you feel like you’re really contributing to global conservation.

But hands-down my favorite gameplay mode is still Sandbox. I’m a bit prone to hyperfixating on small details — I know: the dude with 1,100 hours in the game is a bit obsessive. You don’t say. And that’s why I love this mode. Being able to concentrate on tweaking every last detail and focusing on building the most realistic zoo I can without needing to sweat about profitability or management just speaks to the creative part of my brain.

And, on that front, Planet Zoo 2 is better than ever.

Build baby, build

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Given I’m talking about a game crammed with gorgeous wildlife, brand new habitats and new game modes, I’ll admit this makes me sound tiresomely dull. But honestly, what’s gotten me most excited about Planet Zoo 2 is the part that should be the most boring: logistics upgrades.

Rather than management sims, I’ve always felt like the Planet games are fantastically creative park design tools with a fun game on the side. And these tools have been refined across the board.

Let’s start with the placement tools. Not gonna lie, on release the placement tools in Planet Zoo were so rigid I can honestly understand if many people rarely dug into creating detailed scenery. Fortunately, these have been significantly improved — they feel more fluid, while the scale tools from Planet Coaster 2 and mirroring tools have been added, giving each decorative item significantly more versatility and making it much easier to create organic-looking areas like rockfaces.

Frustrating memories of trying to select scenery items in Planet Zoo — with their utterly random-seeming hitboxes — still haunt me to this day, particularly as deselecting items felt super awkward. In its sequel, these tools have been overhauled, not only making it easier to select and deselect items even on controller but also providing a range of toggles that allow you to restrict selection to certain types of objects, from nature objects to pathing.

While creating pathing used to involve an exasperating degree of trial and error in the original, pathing tools have had significant improvements here. Alongside the original’s straight and curved pathing options, upgrades from Planet Coaster 2 and the Jurassic World Evolution series have been introduced, like stamp and draw tools. This makes it trivial to introduce more organic-looking paths than ever and even super-precise circular courtyards and viewing areas.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

All of these features contribute to making buildings and decorative items feel far easier and more fluid. But it’s not only placing man-made structures that has been improved. I’d argue that one of the hardest areas of creating your dream zoo in Planet Zoo used to be making natural scenery look organic. A significant proportion of that monumental playtime I clocked in the first game came from meticulously placing bushes piece by piece to make scenery look suitably wild.

Fortunately, Frontier has introduced the scenery brushes first created for Planet Coaster 2 into this game, enabling you to quickly paint scenery across your landscape. Not only does it come with a wide array of pre-created options, but you can also make up your own using any combination of scenery you’d like. While the end result can be slightly random-looking and the brushes still don’t get tight enough for creating really dense-looking foliage, this massively speeds up initial placement and allows you to then manually shift and complement the items for significantly faster decoration.

Similarly, terrain brushes have also had loads of new options added, with attract, repel, and curl brushes adding good variety to the existing toolset available. Terrain painting also comes with a significantly wider array of options, with not only lots of sub-terrain types — such as wild grass, long grass, forest floor or scree — but also brush presets that blend combos of the above.

Sadly, these terrain painting tools are the ones that I feel most lukewarm about. While they should add an enormous amount of extra variety to your landscapes, in practice I found them quite hard to blend subtly, with the intensity slider never quite going low enough to reduce hard borders between terrain types. You can achieve a similar effect by rapidly clicking to feather the brushes, but this is one of the few areas where I feel the tools at your disposal could do with some more refining.

Still, though, the impact of the tool and brush improvements has made the game feel far more fluid in action. They’re all tiny QoL upgrades in isolation, but they’re huge in aggregate. It takes Planet Zoo from a game that’s almost notoriously fiddly and rigid to something that feels more approachable for people who don’t have 1,000 hours to learn all of its tricks.

Should you play Planet Zoo 2?

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)Play it if…

You want a whole new world of aquatic and avian critters
Aquariums and aviaries add a whole host of flexible new habitats to bring your zoos to life. Watching turtles and toucans explore their new homes is still a magical experience.

You want the best park design tools to date
Honestly, I can’t think of a single clunky tool from the OG Planet Zoo that hasn’t had a QoL improvement here. They’re more usable, flexible, and creative than ever before.

Don’t play it if…

You want to fill a quick 15 minutes
Preset buildings make playing Planet Zoo 2 much quicker, but creating things from scratch can take a long time. If you want to design your own zoo piece by piece, be prepared to invest some serious time.

You want a whole new game
Planet Zoo 2 builds on its predecessor, so it’s more evolution than revolution. You’ll see some duplicate items and animals, but the range is still staggering, feeling much larger than in the original.

Accessibility features

There’s a small range of accessibility features available here. For those with visual impairments, you can scale the in-game font from 60% to 100% and the UI from 70% to 100%. Meanwhile, Planet Zoo 2 caters to most forms of color blindness, allowing you to change the color of subtitles, as well as the positive, warning, and negative UI feedback colors.

How I reviewed Planet Zoo 2

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Given its lengthy career mode and how long it can take to build custom enclosures, I wanted to make sure I had a broad experience of the game, so I played Planet Zoo 2 for over 75 hours. While I was reviewing the PC version, I made sure to try it out on a variety of devices, including my desktop gaming PC, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark, and my Steam Deck. I also tried playing it with the SteelSeries Aeon Pro controller to ensure it was as playable on controller as it is on mouse and keyboard.

When in-game, I tried to test out as wide a variety of content as possible. I played a significant chunk of the campaign, started several franchise zoos, and began building my own zoo in sandbox mode. I built aquariums, aviaries, and traditional habitats, as well as other scenery items. And I completed multiple research levels in different wildlife reserves.

As for my own experience, not only do I have that ludicrous 1,100-hour playtime in the original Planet Zoo game, but I’ve been playing management sim games ever since the OG, Theme Park, back in 1994. I’ve been gaming across a wide variety of platforms for at least 35 years and now play principally on my PC, Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X.

• First reviewed: October 2026

Any personal information posted on the web remains there for a long time and can reach far-flung corners. That name, email address, and location can be aggregated by people-finder sites (or data brokers) and sold to subscribers.

These data broker sites pose privacy risks, but there’s a way to protect yourself online. You can use platforms like Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover to scan sites for your data, then send deletion requests if found. Malwarebytes facilitates the deletion requests, so there isn’t much to worry about.

Malwarebytes is an all-in-one cybersecurity software suite and is mostly known for its antivirus app. However, it offers other valuable tools, including the Personal Data Remover (if the name didn't give it away, it's a data removal service).

I’m reviewing this tool to help you decide whether it’s worth adopting. Read on to learn about its pros, cons, pricing, support, ease of use, and other essential factors.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Plans and pricing

Malwarebytes doesn’t offer the Personal Data Remover as a separate tool. Rather, it’s offered as part of the Ultimate plan but you can scan for free by clicking here.

The Ultimate plan costs $280 per year, but it’s discounted 50% to $140 on the first year. It unlocks access to the Personal Data Remover and complete antivirus protection, a VPN, and identity protection for 3 devices.

For $400 per year, discounted to $200 on the first year, the Ultimate bundle can be extended to 10 devices for family use.

There are less costly Malwarebytes bundles (Standard for $60 per year and Plus for $80 per year), but none of them include the Personal Data Remover. It seems that if you want access to the Data Remover, you’ll also need to adopt Malwarebytes’ antivirus and VPN apps, which is a major drawback. I’d prefer if the Data Remover were offered as a standalone tool, which I could use alongside other VPN and antivirus tools.

(Image credit: Malwarebytes )

Malwarebytes offers a 14-day free trial of its Ultimate plan, allowing you to test its features before making a final decision. Who knows, you could choose to adopt Malwarebytes as your all-in-one cybersecurity suite after a free trial. There’s also a 60-day money-back guarantee if you aren’t satisfied after paying.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Setup

Firstly, I should note that Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover is only offered to U.S. residents. Non-U.S. residents can use the free Digital Footprint Scanner, which scans your email address against known data breaches and alerts you if any associated account was compromised. However, this Digital Footprint Scanner can’t scan people-finder sites and send deletion requests like the Personal Data Remover.

Malwarebytes’ setup follows a straightforward pattern. First, you’ll activate your subscription (or free trial) on the website. After this step, sign in to Malwarebytes and head to the Secure Hub page. This page provides an overview of all Malwarebytes services available under your subscription.

On the Secure Hub page, look for Personal Data Remover and click “Activate Now”. Once activated, enter your personal details (first and last name, state, city, etc.) to begin a search. Submit the details, and Malwarebytes will run a deep scan across people-finder sites for this data.

The scan can take anywhere from a few hours to several days, depending on how many people-finder sites your data gets discovered on. Once the scan is complete, you’ll be alerted by email to take further action.

Malwarebytes’ scan covers over 100 popular people-finder sites that aggregate data on U.S. residents. This coverage is lower than I encountered on rival platforms, but quantity isn’t all that matters. Malwarebytes makes it clear that its Personal Data Remover is designed for U.S. residents and doesn’t offer global coverage. It focuses on the sites that host U.S.-centric data.

After the scan, you’ll see a list of all sites found to host your personal data. Then, you can initiate deletion requests right from the dashboard. Malwarebytes sends automated deletion requests, and you can track the progress of each request.

However, it doesn’t support manually drafted requests, which is a disadvantage. For websites where automated requests won’t suffice, it does offer to guide you through the site’s manual opt-out process, but that’s no substitute for sending manual requests directly to a site.

I’ve reviewed various data removal platforms that draft deletion request letters where automated requests aren’t enough, and the lack of this service on Malwarebytes is a major drawback.

I’ll rate Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover as a decent service, but there’s a lot that could be improved on. The lack of manual requests and non-U.S. coverage are major drawbacks. Malwarebytes is more of an antivirus and VPN software suite, and the data removal service seems like an add-on.

It’s suitable if you already use Malwarebytes as your cybersecurity suite and don’t want to pay extra for a data removal service, but I wouldn't pick the data removal platform as a first choice.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Ease of use

I didn’t encounter issues when navigating Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover and other features. The signup process was smooth, and so was inputting my personal data, initiating a scan, and getting alerted about the scan results. After initiating removal requests, I tracked the progress of each request conveniently from my dashboard. Malwarebytes has a user-friendly interface that makes using its tools very convenient.

(Image credit: Malwarebytes )Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Security and privacy

Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover doesn’t rank high over various options I’ve tested. Its data removal features are decent, but rival platforms like DeleteMe offer much more.

However, when considering Malwarebytes’ complete cybersecurity suite, it proves invaluable for your online privacy. Under a single subscription, you'll get a VPN to encrypt your browsing activities and hide info from third parties, an antivirus tool to guard against malware attacks, and a platform for removing your data from U.S.-centric people-finder sites.

Identity protection (with insurance) is also offered under the Ultimate bundle, completing the toolkit needed to stay safe online.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Support

Paid subscribers get extensive support resources from Malwarebytes, starting with the official cybersecurity help center. This help center features in-depth guides about data removal and all other Malwarebytes features.

It also contains guides on routine cybersecurity topics like password management, identifying deepfakes and phishing attempts, spoofing, and more.

If you need direct help, Malwarebytes offers email and live chat support. During my live chat support experience I first got connected to a chatbot, but after requesting human support, I was quickly connected to a real support agent.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Competition

Incogni and DeleteMe are two major competitors to Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover. They improve on the Malwarebytes limitations I mentioned earlier, offering much broader broker coverage and manual deletion requests. You’ll get more data scrubbed when using Incogni and DeleteMe, particularly as a U.S. resident.

On the other hand, Incogni and DeleteMe don’t offer the various complementary features you’ll find on Malwarebytes. They’re focused primarily on data removal, while Malwarebytes is more of a complete cybersecurity software suite.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Final verdict

I recommend Malwarebytes more as a complete cybersecurity suite than as a data removal platform. It frankly isn’t my top choice for a data removal service, but considering the other security features accessible through a Malwarebytes subscription, it proves valuable.

• Pixelmator Pro gets a new AI-powered Generate Fill tool
• Keynote, Pages, and Numbers add AI assistants and OpenAI model support
• Final Cut Pro gains thousands of MotionVFX creative assets in November

Apple's Pro and Tell week is marching on, and alongside the reveal of the M6-powered iMac and 14-inch MacBook Pro, the Cupertino-based giant is also shining a spotlight on software. Specifically, Apple Creator Studio is getting a wide-ranging update that brings a fresh batch of features and, ultimately, packs in more value.

As it stands, Apple Creator Studio is a software subscription priced at $12.99 / £12.99 / AU$19.99 a month or $129 / £129 / AU$199 per year, giving you access to Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Pixelmator Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. All that stays the same, including the especially excellent education discount — $2.99 / £2.99 / AU$4.99 per month or $29.99 / £29.99 / AU$49.99 per year — but there are some pretty big updates here, with AI playing a starring role.

Leading the charge is Pixelmator Pro, which is getting a new Generate Fill tool. This lets you select an area of an image, describe what you want to add or change, and let AI do the heavy lifting. It's the kind of feature that could come in handy when you're editing a photo and don't want to jump between apps to get the result you're after. It'll also help level the playing field between Pixelmator Pro and Adobe Photoshop by filling a feature gap.

(Image credit: Apple)

Keynote, Pages, and Numbers are also getting AI assistants designed to help you create presentations, write documents, and work with spreadsheets. Most interestingly, you'll be able to use OpenAI models alongside Apple's own, opening up more possibilities for working with AI in these apps. The apps also support compatible external AI tools, potentially making them a more useful part of your broader workflow.

(Image credit: Apple)

With Final Cut Pro, Apple is bringing MotionVFX content directly into its pro video editing suite, making thousands of creative elements, including transitions, templates, effects, and titles, available for use in your projects. It's another welcome addition that should let you get more done directly inside Final Cut Pro, rather than having to rely on other tools.

(Image credit: Apple)

All of this is coming in November as a free update for existing subscribers, though Apple isn't sharing specific timing just yet. These updates should also be right at home on the new Macs announced this week, but I'm curious to see if Apple introduces any more surprises, like the much-rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro, during its Pro and Tell event tomorrow.

• Russia is testing Sberbank's AI model for future aircraft development
• GigaChat could help engineers explore aircraft configurations during preliminary design
• Moscow is turning to domestic software after Western suppliers withdrew

Russia's United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) is reportedly experimenting with Sberbank's GigaChat AI model to assist engineers developing future military and civilian aircraft.

The initiative could eventually support work on advanced fighter jets, although UAC has not identified any project intended to challenge America's F-22.

With its aerospace industry facing Western technology restrictions, Moscow is increasingly relying on domestically developed software for aircraft engineering and development.

Sberbank's GigaChat enters aircraft development

This project remains in its experimental phase, with UAC yet to announce a development timetable or identify the aircraft involved in the initiative.

The initiative employs GigaChat, a large language model developed by Russia's largest bank, to explore possible configurations before detailed engineering begins.

Engineers could eventually apply the technology to structural strength assessments and aerodynamic computations, although those capabilities are beyond the scope of the initial experiment.

Rather than replacing conventional engineering methods, the proposed applications involve examining multiple configurations and processing information that would otherwise require extensive analysis.

UAC manufactures Russia's Su-57 and Su-35 combat aircraft, as well as civilian programs, including the MC21 passenger jet, which is currently undergoing extensive component substitution.

However, the corporation has not disclosed whether GigaChat contributes to either fighter program or whether its experimental aircraft has military applications.

UAC general designer Sergey Korotkov supported exploring AI tools where practical engineering requirements justify introducing additional computational tools.

“Digital technology makes it possible to take a larger sample and understand a problem more deeply,” said specialists at United Aircraft Corporation.

The manufacturer nevertheless maintains that AI adoption must remain selective, with individual engineering requirements determining whether particular applications are worthwhile.

Western sanctions accelerate Russia's software replacement

Following the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022, major engineering software suppliers withdrew operations, disrupting access to established aerospace development platforms.

Among the departing vendors were Dassault Systèmes, Siemens and Autodesk, whose engineering applications had supported Russian aviation manufacturers for several decades.

To reduce dependence on these suppliers, UAC introduced locally developed alternatives across approximately 4,000 engineering computers at its aircraft design facilities.

The transition also involved replacing nine essential modules responsible for managing aircraft development information throughout different stages of production and maintenance.

In a recent update, UAC reported that digital methods had reduced certain calculations involving hydraulic systems and cabin temperatures considerably.

Engineering tasks previously requiring several months could reportedly be completed within days, although independent verification of these improvements remains unavailable.

Meanwhile, Russia's MC21 passenger aircraft continues experiencing development setbacks as engineers replace imported equipment with components manufactured by domestic suppliers.

Vladimir Putin admitted in June that the programme had slipped by almost two years, with problems involving the wing accounting for part of the delay.

First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov has since set late 2027 as the expected certification date for a version that uses only Russian components.

Via Defence Blog

• Ethernet and HDMI connections distinguish the rugged tablet from similar options
• A 20,080mAh battery accompanies 20W charging and lengthy endurance
• The 10.4-inch display combines 120Hz refresh with 1200 × 1920 resolution

Rugtake has introduced the T3 Pro, a rugged Android tablet featuring dedicated connections rarely found together on similar devices.

The first is the RJ45 LAN port, which provides wired Ethernet access without requiring adapters, making physical network connectivity available directly through the tablet.

A separate HDMI connector supports video output to compatible monitors and projectors, eliminating the need for wireless casting or additional display adapters.

Display, processing hardware, and battery capacity

The rugged tablet carries a 10.4-inch IPS panel with 1200×1920 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate, which together yield a pixel density of 225 PPI.

Brightness is rated at 450cd/㎡ and contrast at 1500:1, though the listing gives no reading for visibility under direct sunlight outdoors.

A Spreadtrum G100 processor built with 6nm technology drives the device, and its eight cores reach speeds of 2.3GHz.

Graphics processing relies on the Mali G57 GPU, while Widevine L1 support enables higher resolution playback through compatible protected streaming services.

Although advertised with 30GB RAM, the tablet contains only 6GB physical memory, supplemented by 24GB allocated from its internal storage.

This distinction matters because virtual memory uses storage resources and cannot deliver the same performance characteristics as equivalent amounts of physical RAM.

Its built-in storage reaches 256GB, with microSD card expansion supporting capacities up to 2TB for additional applications, photographs and other files.

An integrated camping lamp produces 380 lumens and includes an SOS signalling function with illumination endurance reaching 240 hours.

On the rear, this device uses a dual camera setup which includes a 20MP primary camera and a dedicated night vision sensor, while a 16MP camera is available for selfies.

The camera supports phase detection autofocus, HDR processing, portrait effects, and underwater photography, while videos can be captured at 1080p resolution.

Rugged construction and outdoor functionality

Designed for demanding environments, the tablet supports IP68 and IP69K protection alongside MIL STD 810H compliance for physical durability.

This implies that it is resistant to dust, water exposure, and certain environmental scenarios to certain levels.

The T3 Pro chassis measures 250.46 × 160.23 × 18.5mm, with grey and black finishes accompanied by a stand and carrying strap.

For cellular communication, the device supports two Nano SIM cards, 4G networks, alongside dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0.

Additional wireless capabilities include NFC for compatible contactless services, while four satellite navigation systems provide geographical information during travel and outdoor activities.

The device also includes FM radio functionality, glove operation and facial recognition, expanding the available controls beyond conventional touchscreen interaction methods.

Under the hood, it hosts a huge 20,080mAh battery, while 20W USB-C charging provides replenishment without the faster charging rates available elsewhere.

According to the company, on full charge, this device lasts three to five days of regular usage, about 60 days of standby operation, and 48 hours of continuous calling.

The Rugtake T3 Pro currently appears with a $0.00 price on its product page, yet buyers in the US can place an order.

The figure does not mean the tablet is free, and it most likely signals a reservation or preorder while the retail price remains unannounced.

The world is expected to come to a standstill in roughly three weeks, when the long-overdue, much-anticipated GTA VI finally, finally launches on November 19.

If you've already preordered the game, or are planning to, you might be wondering whether you've got the best TV to make the most of its sumptuous graphics. But there's something else you'll want to consider before launch day: is your home internet connection up to the task of downloading what could be an absolutely enormous game?

Our friends at GamesRadar have reported that GTA VI could weigh in at a whopping 210GB on PS5, roughly double the size of GTA V. And with Rockstar confirming that even physical copies will contain a download code rather than a disc, there's no escaping the need for a sizeable download, regardless of which version you buy.

That means you'll not only need to make sure you've got enough storage space on your console — one of the best SSDs for PS5 could help if you're running low — but you'll also want to know how long it'll take to download. And with preloading confirmed to start on November 12, there's good reason to start preparing now.

So, I've crunched the numbers to find out how long a 210GB download would take on every NBN speed tier, from NBN 25 all the way up to NBN 2000.

The results make for interesting reading. While the difference between the slowest and fastest plans is enormous, it's the jump from NBN 100 to NBN 500 that could provide the most compelling reason to upgrade.

How long will GTA VI take to download on your NBN plan?

The table below shows the estimated time it would take to download GTA VI on each NBN speed tier. These calculations assume a file size of 210GB, which remains unconfirmed, and that each connection maintains its maximum advertised download speed throughout. Actual download times may vary depending on network congestion, your equipment and the speeds supported by the game servers.

NBN plan

Download speed

Time to download

NBN 25

25Mbps

18h 40m

NBN 50

50Mbps

9h 20m

NBN 100

100Mbps

4h 40m

NBN 500

500Mbps

56m

NBN 750

750Mbps

37m 20s

NBN 1000

1,000Mbps

28m

NBN 2000

2,000 Mbps

14m

NBN 25 vs NBN 2000

If you're still on an NBN 25 plan, you might want to make yourself comfortable. Based on a 210GB download, you'd be looking at a wait time of approximately 18 hours and 40 minutes before GTA VI is ready to play. And that's assuming your connection can maintain its full 25Mbps download speed throughout.

At the other end of the spectrum, an NBN 2000 connection could theoretically download the same game in just 14 minutes. Clearly, that’s a crazy difference, but there are some important caveats to be aware of before you put an order in for one of the best NBN 2000 plans.

For starters, you'll need a new network termination device (NTD) installed at your premises, along with a compatible router with at least a 2.5Gbps WAN port to take full advantage of the connection. Even with these two taken care of, your console could still be a limiting factor.

The standard PS5 and PS5 Slim support Wi-Fi 6, while the more powerful PS5 Pro supports Wi-Fi 7. The latter is theoretically capable of wireless speeds exceeding 2Gbps when paired with a compatible router, but real-world performance will depend on a variety of factors.

And if you prefer the reliability of a wired connection, all PS5 models have a Gigabit Ethernet port, effectively limiting download speeds to around 1Gbps at best.

So while an NBN 2000 plan might sound like the ultimate solution for downloading GTA VI in record time, there's no guarantee your console will be able to make full use of all that bandwidth.

NBN 500 proves it worth once more

Despite coming to the conclusion that an NBN 1000 plan offers the best value on a cost per mb basis, I still believe that an NBN 500 plan is the sweet spot for most Australian homes. The combination of fast speeds and low-cost monthly fees is a win-win in my book.

And now the best NBN 500 plans are making a solid argument for upgrading, whether that be from an NBN 50 plan, or taking advantage of the free fibre upgrade to get your home connected via fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology.

As the table further up shows, an NBN 100 connection would theoretically take four hours and 40 minutes to download a 210GB game. Step up to NBN 500, and that figure plummets to just 56 minutes — a time saving of almost four hours, and a fivefold increase in download speed.

The benefits become less dramatic as you move further up the speed tiers. An NBN 750 plan would shave another 19 minutes off the download, while NBN 1000 could theoretically have the game ready in just 28 minutes.

Of course, faster is always better when you're impatiently waiting to play one of the most anticipated games in history. But whether those additional minutes are worth paying more for is another question entirely.

And with NBN 500 plans now widely available from Australian internet providers, it could be the most sensible choice for gamers who want significantly faster downloads without necessarily paying for the fastest connection available.

Still on FTTN or FTTC? Now could be the time to upgrade

There's one final consideration, particularly if you're still connected to the NBN via fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) or fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC).

While these connection types can support an NBN 100 plan, you'll generally need an FTTP or hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) connection to access the faster NBN 500, 750 and 1000 speed tiers.

The good news is that many Australians with FTTN or FTTC connections are eligible to upgrade to FTTP through NBN Co's fibre upgrade program.

If you're eligible, you can arrange the upgrade through your internet provider, although installation timeframes will vary depending on your property and the work required.

With GTA VI preloading scheduled to begin on November 12, it's worth checking your eligibility sooner rather than later if you're considering making the switch.

And while upgrading your internet connection solely for one game might seem a little excessive, the benefits of faster downloads, additional bandwidth and a more capable connection will extend well beyond GTA VI.

The NBN plan to get

If you’re questioning whether your current NBN is going to be up to the task of handling the GTA VI download file, then there’s one plan in particular that I can confidently recommend.

Exetel One | 500Mbps | AU$80p/m

Exetel’s NBN 500 plan could be the goldilocks option for GTA players. Not only does it promise maximum plan speeds during busier evening hours, but customers can boost the speed up to NBN 1000 for AU$1 per 24-hour period. Plus, the telco recorded the quickest ping speeds in the most recent ACCC broadband performance data report of 6.9ms, which could be ideal if you intend to game online. Plus, its low-cost monthly fee makes it the cheapest provider from year two of service.

• AU$80 minimum cost
• AU$960 yearly costView Deal

Ultimately, whichever NBN plan you're on, a little preparation could go a long way towards making sure you're ready for GTA VI's launch.

If you're on a slower connection, taking advantage of the preload period could mean the difference between playing as soon as the game unlocks and spending launch day staring at a download progress bar.

And while upgrading to a faster NBN plan could dramatically reduce your download time, there's no need to rush out and sign up for the fastest connection available. As the figures above demonstrate, even a relatively modest upgrade could make a substantial difference.

After all, you've waited years for GTA VI. What's a few more hours?

Felix Mobile has long been the sole provider of truly unlimited mobile data plans in Australia, with the only catch being download speeds are limited. For a time, the telco’s only offering was 40Mbps for AU$40 per month. Earlier this month, though, the telco unveiled a faster Unlimited+ plan that doubles download speeds to 80Mbps, for only AU$10 extra each month.

In my mind, AU$50 a month for truly unlimited data is a bit of a bargain, but now Felix Mobile has taken things a step further by offering 50% off its Unlimited+ plan for the first 6 months — that’s just AU$25 per month for as much mobile data as you need, at speeds up to 80Mbps.

Felix Mobile Unlimited+ | Unlimited data/calls/texts | No lock-in contract | AU$25/m (first 6 months, then AU$50/m)

Felix Mobile is the only mobile provider in Australia with truly unlimited data plans, and it's now offering a much faster Unlimited+ plan with 80Mbps speeds (up from 40Mbps in the existing Felix Unlimited plan) using Vodafone’s 5G and 4G networks. If you sign up anytime before November 30, you’ll only pay AU$25/m for the first 6 months, representing an annual saving of AU$150. The plan also includes unlimited standard calls and texts. Unlimited international calls and texts to 40+ selected countries are also available for an extra AU$5/m.View Deal

Most telcos in Australia technically offer unlimited mobile data on their plans, but they almost always throttle the speeds significantly once you’ve used your monthly allowance — usually down to around 2Mbps. Felix Mobile’s Unlimited and Unlimited+ plans forego data caps entirely, and the speeds remain consistent at 40Mbps and 80Mbps, respectively (compared to the minimum 100-150Mbps that most telcos offer).

The 80Mbps speeds of Felix Unlimited+ will be virtually identical to a 100-150Mbps mobile plan for everyday browsing, social media and music streaming, and I’d argue that even streaming 4K video will perform quite similarly, too.

You’d only be able to tell the difference when you’re downloading large files and apps, though you’d be better off using your home internet for those, anyway.

Felix recommends using the Unlimited+ plan for personal mobile use only, with occasional hotspotting to personal devices like laptops or tablets while on the go, and it shouldn’t replace a home or office internet plan or be used for continuous downloading of large files.

If you want to test the data speeds before committing, Felix also offers a 7-day guarantee where you can get a full refund within 7 days of activating if you’re not satisfied.