TechRadar News

• Microsoft has admitted it's automatically installing an app on Windows 11
• The OneDrive Photos app is also being deployed mistakenly to business PCs as well as consumers
• There are a few odd things about this episode, and it's an anti-consumer move that doesn't sit well with Microsoft's broader goals to make Windows 11 better

Microsoft is in hot water after an odd decision to roll out a OneDrive Photos app to Windows 11 PCs used by consumers (with it also accidentally deploying the app to enterprise systems).

Windows Latest reports that Microsoft "effectively" told the website that the OneDrive Photos app is being automatically installed on Windows 11 computers whether it's wanted or not.

OneDrive Photos is a separate app to OneDrive, and it's designed for photo viewing and organization (with a light editing element bolted on). However, it's plain user-hostile behavior to have this software stealthily piped to a Windows 11 PC and forcibly installed.

What if you don't want it? What if you don't even use OneDrive sync at all, and you aren't signed in with a Microsoft account on your PC? Tough — you still get OneDrive Photos, as Windows Latest points out.

Even more bizarrely, this app — which is labelled as a beta — is appearing on business PCs, which it definitely shouldn't be doing (it's only used with a personal Microsoft account).

Microsoft wouldn't previously comment on the appearance of the OneDrive Photos app, but at least the company has now acknowledged that it is being installed on Windows 11 PCs.

There's still no official comment on why business devices would be getting this software, but Windows Latest tells us that it "understands that the rollout to enterprise PCs was not intentional". So apparently this was a mistake, and one that Microsoft is presumably in the process of correcting.

It's worth noting that there's also been some controversy about AI scanning faces for a feature in OneDrive Photos, accessed via the 'People' option, but this is only active if you explicitly allow it to be turned on (it's clearly opt-in, in other words).

Microsoft has clarified that if 'face grouping' is enabled, it runs only in the cloud with OneDrive photos (not other images on your PC), and any data collected is removed 30 days after you turn it off. The company has also assured users that it isn't using any photo data to train AI models on faces.

Analysis: I'm trying to tell you now, it's sabotage…

(Image credit: Future)

What is Microsoft playing at here? I really don't know, but this OneDrive Photos affair is a mess for a lot of reasons, and as you might guess, it has rubbed people up the wrong way. For starters, business users are very unhappy about having a piece of consumer-targeted beta software automatically deployed on their PCs, and are busy writing scripts to remove it (like this one on Reddit for example), rather than waiting for Microsoft to fix its error.

This is a baffling move for consumers too, because as noted, even if you don't use OneDrive at all, you'll still get this partner photo app. You can't even remove the OneDrive Photos app without deleting OneDrive as well — so if you do use the cloud storage app and sync features in Windows 11, but don't want this extra Photos application, well, you're stuck with it. You can have both, or neither.

That latter situation will change, though, Windows Latest informs us, and Microsoft is preparing an update that lets you remove the OneDrive Photos app without needing to nuke OneDrive entirely. I should hope so, too, and it's confusing how this rollout of a beta app went ahead without that choice in place.

The broad reaction on Reddit has been heated to say the least, and this is just more grit for anyone with an anti-Microsoft axe to grind.

One Redditor said "I'm uninstalling Windows. Linux is a little bit of a pain but worth it." There are more than a few similar comments in that thread, whether they're from people vowing to switch to Linux, or those who've already departed for OS pastures greener: "So glad I left Windows behind. Good riddance."

Interestingly, there are reports of this app appearing on Windows 10 PCs in the Reddit thread those comments are drawn from, although I haven't seen it on my computer with that OS (while it is on my Windows 11 system).

The trouble with all this is that it underlines how Microsoft is a vast corporation where the various limbs aren't always moving in alignment with the same aims. While the right hand is fixing Windows 11 and implementing a whole bunch of crowd-pleasing features or tweaks, the left hand is still messing around with anti-consumer initiatives such as this. Did no one tell the OneDrive team that Microsoft is supposed to be going full-tilt to persuade everyone that Windows 11 is the place to be, and that the software giant has mended its pushier and more obnoxious ways?

Apparently not, and just as we don't want third-party apps for the likes of monitors pushed on us quietly, in the background, via Windows Update, we don't want to unknowingly get first-party Microsoft software sprung on us, either.

Sort it out, Microsoft, please, because this is becoming an embarrassing oversight in terms of the big (and otherwise commendable) drive to make Windows 11 better.

• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier is free to keep on PC until August 13
• The game is a tactical third-person shooter set in 2024
• The giveaway comes as part of the series' 25th anniversary

Ubisoft just made a classic Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon game free to keep to celebrate the franchise's 25th anniversary — but you only have a few days to claim it.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier can be added to your Ubsioft Connect library on PC from August 6 until August 13 for no charge.

To get your hands on it, download the Ubisoft Connect application on your PC and create an account. If you've played recent Ubisoft releases like Assassin's Creed Blag Flag Resynced or other Ghost Recon games, then you likely already have one, and can log in using your existing details instead.

Head to the library page and then select the 'Free games' tab.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

There you'll see a banner for the Ghost Recon Future Soldier giveaway. Click it to go through to the game's store page, and then hit 'Get it now' to add it to your account. You can then download and play the game.

Originally released in 2012, Ghost Recon Future Soldier is set in the then-futuristic year of 2024. It follows an elite squad of special-ops soldiers who use technology to gain an advantage in deadly battlefields around the world.

Tactical use of gadgets like drones and adaptive camouflage are keys to success, as is careful command of your AI teammates.

The game launched with a suite of multiplayer modes as well, though these were taken offline in 2022, which is unfortunate. Still, it's hard to grumble too much about a game you're getting completely for free.

The giveaway comes amid a flurry of other Ghost Recon announcements to mark the anniversary, including the release of a 4K 60fps mode for recent installment Ghost Recon Wildlands alongside the addition of a new story mission called Last Rites.

• Google product approvals are being delayed, impacting small businesses
• Experts advise businesses not to resubmit products needlessly
• Google has not yet commented on the issue

Local SEO professionals, agencies, and small businesses have been reporting widespread issues with new and existing product listings becoming trapped in Google’s approval process, leading to concerns over the upcoming back-to-school period.

According to reports, the issues have been ongoing since July 30 2026, with it being raised both in Google’s own support community and leading local search forums. Businesses from multiple countries have reported the same glitch.

Google has not yet publicly acknowledged the issue, frustrating businesses that are preparing for the upcoming busy period.

Small business reliance on Google

The issue highlights a wider problem for small businesses that rely on platforms like Google to drive traffic to their products and services.

With small budgets and time constraints, small businesses often rely on just a handful of sources to drive the bulk of traffic to their websites. For example, a small store may rely primarily on their Google Business Profile to be the main way potential customers discover them.

So, when issues like these occur and platforms like Google fail to address them, it leaves small businesses frustrated and making best guesses on how to proceed.

Don’t panic

Some businesses have reported continuously editing and submitting products in the hope that they will eventually be approved. According to some experts, this is exactly the wrong approach to take.

"Your first instinct is usually to keep editing the product or submit it again, hoping it will finally go live. Unfortunately, that's often the worst thing you can do,” says Thomas Phillips, Founder and Marketing Expert at DTC SEO Agency. “If this is a platform-wide issue, every resubmission effectively sends your product back into the review process. Instead of getting approved sooner, you risk resetting the clock each time."

For now, it appears the best course of action is to continue updating your site as usual and to avoid purposefully updating and submitting products several times in an attempt to get them approved.

Phillips also advises checking trusted SEO communities to see if others are facing a similar challenge before taking drastic action:

"When multiple agencies start reporting the same behaviour at the same time, it's usually a sign that the problem sits with the platform rather than the business.”

• New panel has two-stack structure with redesigned emissive layers
• The result is much better color reproduction and good brightness
• It's likely to succeed OLED SE, which is in entry-level 2026 TVs

LG Display has developed a simpler kind of OLED panel that should deliver a better picture and cost less to make or buy than the panels in current WOLED TVs.

Where most WOLED TV panels use a three-stack structure to emit light (or four stacks in the case of some more premium versions), LG Display's new design uses two. That, the firm says, will reduce production costs and improve energy efficiency. And it'll also deliver improved colors.

The new panel is designed to be used in mid-range OLED TVs and in computer monitors, making it a direct rival for mini-LED. But you can't get it just yet; although the new panel exists, it hasn't entered mass production.

You can expect to see the new two-stack panels in TVs such as the successor to LG's B6 OLED TV. (Image credit: Disney / Future )When two stacks can be better than three

This isn't the first time LG Display has made two-stack OLED panels: it produced two-stack OLEDs throughout the 2010s, but moved to three- and later four-stack structures to deliver improved picture quality and brightness. However, the more stacks you have, the more complex and expensive your panels become, and improvements in both materials and engineering have enabled LG Display to produce a two-stack design that wasn't possible a decade ago.

As LG Display explained to the Korean news sites The Elec and ETNews, reported by FlatpanelsHD, the two-stack WOLED panel uses a new blue emissive material and replaces the conventional yellow/green emissive layer with separate red and green layers.

That change enables the panel to deliver more accurate color reproduction, improving BT.2020 color coverage from 76.5% on three-stack panels to 82.5% on the new panel.

It's slightly brighter at 6500 Kelvin color temperatures, although it's a little less bright than WOLED at higher color temperatures. LG says it delivers wider viewing angles, too.

Speaking to The Elec, an industry source said: "If the next-generation two-stack architecture enters mass production, LG Display will be able to defend its position in the premium segment while expanding into the mid-range TV and monitor markets, where LCD and mini-LED technologies remain dominant."

As for when that expansion will happen, we don't have a definite timescale just yet: while the new panels are clearly destined for future LG TVs, LG Display hasn't said when it'll be making the panels available to the likes of Samsung, Sony, Philips and Panasonic.

For this year's affordable OLEDs, the key panel technology is OLED SE, which is the panel used in models such as the 2026 Panasonic Z86C (Z85C in Europe). That's brighter than previous entry-level OLEDs, but the potential downside is that the panel can be more reflective. There are various ways manufacturers can address that, but if reflectivity is a problem in your room it's important to read the reviews to find out what (if anything) they've done to reduce it.

Thinking of buying a new TV?

Try our TV size and model finder! You tell it how far you sit from your TV, we'll tell you what size to buy based on viewing angle advice from image quality experts, and we'll recommend our three top TVs at that size for different prices.

• Musk has recently been bullish about Starlink's potential as a rival to T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T
• However, T-Mobile's CEO sees satellite connectivity as complementary to conventional coverage
• As such, they think that Starlink's threat to mobile operators has been exaggerated

If you believe Elon Musk, then Starlink could soon pose a major threat to the US’s mobile operators, but the CEO of T-Mobile disagrees.

According to Musk in a recent earnings call, Starlink’s terrestrial cellular network will “probably” offer better connectivity and higher bandwidth than cellular providers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T. In fact, Musk even went so far as to say that he envisions Starlink will ultimately "deliver a majority of the world's internet."

As a result, Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX (which owns Starlink), added that she expects the company to “acquire quite a few” customers from those mobile networks.

But in an interview with the Financial Times, T-Mobile’s CEO Srini Gopalan argued that “you’ve got to ask the question of ‘what is the gap in the market that they’re looking to serve?’,” adding “I always prefer starting these conversations back from the customer: why would a customer buy a new cellular service? Where do they go? What’s their differentiation? It’s clearly not having a broad network.”

An alternative or an addition?

T-Mobile has already partnered with Starlink (Image credit: T-Mobile Starlink)

Of course, Musk has arguably already answered the question of differentiation with his claims of Starlink having higher bandwidth and better connectivity, and indeed T-Mobile already leverages Starlink satellites to boost its rural coverage.

But Gopalan suggests that this is how things should be, with satellite connectivity being “complementary” to existing networks.

So it remains to be seen who is right here. A lot might come down to price, and whether Starlink continues giving the likes of T-Mobile access to its satellites once it has launched a rival service.

That service isn’t expected until the end of 2027, though, so T-Mobile and the US’s other mobile operators have some time to make sure they remain competitive.

Recently in Geneva, the world's largest forum on AI for Good, gathered around a simple question: how can technology best serve society? While the sentiment goes back to pre-industrial times, the conversation has firmly moved to algorithms. What about the machines that will come next?

Quantum technology has crossed a line. It is no longer a distant promise, but a growing portfolio of real applications. Quantum and quantum-inspired solutions are being applied to the simulations that underpin nuclear power, to protein design in drug discovery, and traffic forecasting in congested cities.

Quantum sensors are being tested for medical imaging, navigation where satellite signals fail, and monitoring carbon storage sites deep underground. These are no longer mere laboratory curiosities: they are increasingly emerging as working programs, with industrial partners and delivery dates.

For those of us in the industry, these developments are both timely and long anticipated. But they also force us to confront a less comfortable reality: the same machines that will one day simulate new molecules will also break the public-key cryptography that secures much of the modern internet.

By some estimates, up to 80% of the world's digital infrastructure is exposed. The world's digital economy - not to mention every AI model celebrated in Geneva, runs on encrypted data. Every health record or financial transaction owes its confidentiality to mathematical assumptions that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will overturn.

Store now, decrypt later

The threat timeline is worse than most realize. Rather than waiting for when the machine arrives, the clock started the moment adversaries began harvesting encrypted traffic: the so-called “store now, decrypt later” approach.

Data that remains valuable for years, from medical records to state secrets, may already be beyond rescue. Nobody knows exactly when “Q-Day” comes. But those who harvest our data today have time on their side.

This is why quantum-safe security cannot be a footnote to quantum computing. It is the other half of the field, and it needs to mature on the same schedule.

Quantum trip-wire

Two defenses exist, and they are not interchangeable. Post-quantum cryptography replaces vulnerable algorithms with mathematics believed to resist quantum attacks; it is software, it scales, and it is the workhorse of the migration now beginning worldwide.

Quantum key distribution takes a different route: it distributes encryption keys using quantum states of light that cannot be intercepted without being disturbed. In this way, these schemes deploy a “quantum trip-wire", an eavesdropper reveals herself by the simple act of listening-in

Far from being in competition, both algorithmic and physics-based solutions have roles to play in tomorrow's networks. Serious infrastructure will layer both.

Neither of these solutions are theoretical. New post-quantum standards have been finalized, with contributions from research teams around the world. And quantum-secured networks are already running in the field: since 2022, Abu Dhabi has hosted entanglement-based metropolitan networks, like the ADGM Quantum Testbed announced in August 2025.

These are initiatives that bring quantum security to where data actually lives. Long-range terrestrial links, satellite connections and “last-mile” access networks are the next steps, extending that protection between cities and, eventually, across continents. If there's one lesson the field has learned from operating these systems, it's this: migration takes years, so the time to start is before the threat matures, not after.

Depth of capability

There is a broader lesson in how this capability is being built. A growing number of nations have chosen to be builders of quantum technology rather than buyers, developing the full portfolio of sensing, communications and computing solutions. From processor fabrication to control software, to the hardware enabling quantum networks: the word “sovereignty” is often heard as a synonym for walls.

But our experience suggests otherwise. It is precisely the teams that build every layer themselves that can contribute most readily to the global commons, from working with international standards organizations like ITU and ETSI on quantum-safe networking, to releasing open-source middleware that researchers worldwide now use to program quantum hardware, wherever it was made.

It is this depth of capability that turns a nation from a spectator of the quantum era into an active participant.

That should also be the model for the decade ahead. No single country will own quantum technology, and no single vendor should be the sole authority on quantum-era trust. What the field needs now is what the AI community showcased in Geneva: open tools that lower the barrier to entry, interoperable standards so quantum-safe systems can talk to each other, and honest engagement with the risks alongside the promise.

For years, the defining question about quantum computing has been when the machines will arrive. Increasingly, I think that's the wrong question. The more important question is whether the digital world they inherit will still deserve their trust. The answer depends on what we choose to secure, build, and share today.

Quantum for good does not start with a breakthrough. It starts with trust.

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For years, cybersecurity was built on a simple assumption: systems follow defined rules.

Applications do what they are programmed to do, while people log in, are given permissions and access the resources they need. Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing that.

With nearly 50% of cybersecurity solutions buyers expecting AI to be embedded across the cyber stack within three years, organizations are no longer focused solely on protecting applications and access rights.

They also need to secure intelligent systems that can make decisions, interact with users and act autonomously.

AI can draw on models, prompts, context and external tools to understand a goal, make decisions and determine how best to achieve it.

As organizations give these agentic systems greater autonomy across enterprise workflows, the consequences of failure extend beyond generating a wrong answer.

A mistake can now disrupt business processes, influence decisions and trigger unintended actions across connected systems.

An expanded attack surface

Greater autonomy creates new points of vulnerability whenever AI is given access to data, systems and external tools.

Cyber threats, such as attackers manipulating the information AI receives or impersonating trusted users, can alter how it responds or the actions it takes. This could lead an AI agent to retrieve inaccurate information or approve unauthorized actions.

Traditional cybersecurity controls were designed for humans and applications, but autonomous agents don’t fit neatly into either category. Security therefore needs to extend further across the entire AI lifecycle: before go-live, during operations, and at every point where AI learns, decides, and acts.

Organizations need a unified security architecture that provides consistent visibility and controls across both AI and traditional systems, which makes it easier to identify threats, enforce policies and respond quickly when incidents occur.

Trusting AI safely

However, a unified architecture is only part of the solution. Businesses also need to ensure the AI agents themselves can be trusted. Like any trusted user or system, AI agents should have a verifiable identity, tightly controlled access to data and systems, and auditable records of the actions they take.

Without these safeguards, organizations risk creating AI systems that can bypass security and compliance controls because of design flaws rather than malicious intent. Security also cannot stop once an AI system is deployed. Unlike traditional software, AI systems learn from new data, operate in changing contexts and can behave differently over time.

Organizations therefore need continuous monitoring to ensure agents stay within defined boundaries and policies continue to be enforced. That includes clear ownership, escalation paths and kill switches that can safely contain or stop an agent behaving unexpectedly. Some organizations are also beginning to use "guardian agents" that monitor other AI agents and flag unusual behavior.

The level of oversight should reflect the level of risk. AI agents carrying out low-impact tasks can remain largely autonomous, while higher-risk activities - such as updating customer data, approving financial transactions or interacting with production systems - should have stronger guardrails.

Applying controls in proportion to risk allows organizations to capture the benefits of AI while maintaining security, compliance and trust.

Context as a security boundary

Securing AI also means securing the information it relies on. Context is what gives AI agents their power. This includes internal documents, customer information, business rules and previous interactions, helping agents understand a task and decide what to do next.

That also makes context a new security boundary. If the information an AI relies on is inaccurate or has been deliberately manipulated, the decisions it makes can be wrong, even if the underlying model is working exactly as intended. This is known as context poisoning.

Protecting against this means controlling what AI can see as well as what it can do. Agents should only have access to the data and systems they need for a specific task. For example, an AI assistant answering employee questions should not have the same level of access as one authorized to approve payments.

Guardrails must go beyond filtering outputs and extent to protecting the integrity of the information AI uses, ensuring it is accurate, up to date and appropriate for the task at hand.

Governance at scale

Technical controls are most effective when they are supported by effective governance. This requires a joined-up approach that brings together AI and traditional systems, with consistent controls across the business.

Organizations should also define where human intervention is required and who is responsible for the decisions models make. Oversight should focus on the activities that carry the greatest operational, financial or regulatory risk, supported by investment in the skills needed to govern AI effectively and maintain trust in autonomous systems.

The path forward

Ultimately, securing AI is about more than protecting systems from attack. Organizations need the right technical solutions, clear ownership and continuous oversight throughout the AI lifecycle. Trust depends on these elements working together.

The organizations that succeed with AI will not necessarily be those that move fastest, but those that scale it securely and responsibly. The question for leaders is no longer whether to trust AI, but whether they are building systems that deserve to be trusted.

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• Microsoft temporarily rolls back planned Teams tool concerning muted chats
• The update would have made it easier to organize (and ignore) unnecessary conversations
• It's not known when the update will get back in progress

Microsoft has pulled an update which would have made it much easier for Teams users to organize their chats - particularly those which have been muted.

The company had revealed it was working on new built-in sections within Teams to house all the muted chats in one area, meaning users shouldn't be distracted or annoyed by unnecessary alerts.

However the update has now been "temporarily rolled back", with Microsoft apologizing for the "inconvenience".

A bit of a shame?

The move is a slightly odd one, as the description of the update makes it sound like something all Teams users would appreciate.

In its Microsoft 365 roadmap entry, the company said the new grouping will "help reduce clutter and keep conversations easy to find" - but also probably help lower stress levels for users plagued by alerts on chats they don't need to know about.

The change, which was in the works for users across Android, iOS, desktop and web, would have seen muted chats grouped together in a dedicated area, while meeting chats would have been able to be collected into a single section for quick access.

Microsoft had even added that "You’re always in control", as each section would have been able to be activated or turned off based on a user's specific preferences.

The new Meeting chats section would have replaced the Meeting chats filter, found at the top of the chat and channel list, giving users a much better insight to their conversations.

Microsoft hasn't given any details as to why the update is delayed, or when it will be coming back onto the workbench, so we'll just have to wait and see.

As mentioned, it's a shame, as Teams users no doubt would have welcomed any relief from the overload of chats. Slack already offers this feature, with muted channels and conversations hidden away if desired, so maybe Microsoft is taking extra time to finesse and develop the feature before releasing it to users.

After a fairly competitive preorder phase, the brand-new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Galaxy Z Flip 8 are all officially available. And while many of those pre-release offers are no longer available, several launch deals are live now at various retailers and mobile networks. I've picked out the best value options right here.

The official Samsung store remains one of the best places to go in the US, offering a hefty trade-in rebate of up to $1,000 or a flat $200 in Samsung credit without a trade. As for the networks, T-Mobile remains my number one pick, as it still offers a massive discount of up to $1,900 on the Z Fold 8 when you trade in and add an eligible line — that's the biggest rebate out there and one of the largest ever seen for a new phone launch.

The UK deals aren't quite as attention-grabbing as many of the trade-in rebates have been reduced, but there are some good savings out there on all of the new devices.

Again, the official Samsung store is a smart place to start, with trade-in discounts of up to £752, extra savings on larger storage models, and freebies when you bundle in some network plans. Meanwhile, networks such as Vodafone and O2 offer the largest trade-in savings, or you can get a free Samsung Galaxy Watch 9 at Sky Mobile.

I'll keep an eye out for all the latest Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8, Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra launch deals over the next few days in case any better offers go live. Hopefully there will be a combination of phone and plan that suits you.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Z Fold 8 deals in the US

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: up to $1,000 off with a trade-in or $200 off without
Samsung's offer on its new Flip and Fold range include trade-in rebates of up to $1,000 for the Fold 8 and up to $400 for the Flip 8 — that's $200 less than the preorder phase. Still, if you don't have a phone to hand over, you can still get a flat $200 in Samsung credit when buying the Fold 8 or $100 with the Flip 8. There are also bundle discounts of up to 15% when buying other accessories at the same time.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: up to $1,900 off the Galaxy Fold 8 Ultra with a trade-in and qualifying line
T-Mobile's launch offer for the new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Fold 8 includes a saving of up to $1,900 on the Fold 8 Ultra when you trade in — that will effectively bring the price of the device down to $100. You will need to add a qualifying line to your account at the same time, such as the Experience Beyond plan.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: get a Galaxy Z Fold 8 for $60 a month
The standout launch deal at Verizon is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 for $60 a month on a 48-month contract — and that's with no trade-in required, either. If you are looking to upgrade, you can get up to $1,100 off with a trade-in, and even add a Galaxy Watch 9 or Galaxy Tab S10 FE for free when you buy a new phone or upgrade.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: get the Galaxy Z Fold 8 for $0 with an eligible trade-in
AT&T's standout offer on Samsung's new foldable line-up is this offer that can get you a Z Fold 8 for free when you trade in an eligible device and sign up for an eligible unlimited plan. You can also add a Galaxy Watch9 and Tab A11 Plus for $1.99 per month each with a new line, and get $200 off a new line when you order online.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: get an extra $400 with a trade-in, plus a $350 Amazon Gift Card
One of the stronger options if you just want to buy a device outright is at Amazon. As well as a savings bonus of up to $400 when you trade-in, you also get a gift card worth up to $350 with Samsung's latest foldable handsets. There's also a bundle that includes a pair of Galaxy Buds 4 Pro with a 10% discount.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Z Fold 8 deals in the UK

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: up to £752 off with a trade-in, and an extra savings on larger storage models
The launch offer for the Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Fold 8 range at the official Samsung store includes a discount of up to £752 when you trade-in and an extra saving of up to £170 on larger 512GB or 1TB storage models. Contract options are also available from £10 per month and from £249 upfront. Finally, six months of Google AI Pro are included with all handsets.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: from £51 per month, up to £528 off with a trade-in
Offers for the Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Galaxy Z Fold 8 start at £47 per month at EE on the 125GB Essential package. If you have a phone to trade in, you can also get a saving of up to £528 across all three devices, plus there's the option to add a Galaxy Watch 9 and save £288.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: trade-in to save up to £1,550
Vodafone's is offering its biggest ever trade-in deal for the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Fold 8 Ultra, with savings of up to £1,550 when trading in an eligible device. You can also get up to £1,130 off the Galaxy Z Flip 8 with a trade-in. Unlimited data contracts then start from £31.92 per month and from £40 upfront.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: up to £1,325 off with a trade-in
Trade-in offers at O2 include savings of up to £1,325 on the new Galaxy series devices when you pair them with an Unlimited Classic or Unlimited Plus plan.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: save up to £1,478 with a trade-in and get unlimited data
Three's trade-in offer for the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Fold 8 includes a discount of up to £1,478 when you hand in an eligible device. An extra £100 cashback is also available if you pair your device with a Samsung connected tablet, watch, or PC.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: up to £796 off with a trade-in, plus free Galaxy Watch 9
Over at Sky Mobile, you can save up to £796 on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8, Fold 8, and Fold 8 Ultra when you trade in your existing handset. Contract prices with a handset start at £38 per month and £12 upfront for 256GB of data. As a bonus, every Galaxy Z Flip 8 order includes a free Galaxy Watch 9 (40mm) worth £349, while a Galaxy Z Fold 8 order comes with a free Galaxy Watch 9 (44mm) worth £379.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: from £39.99 a month, plus get £100 in Clubcard points
Rather than the big trade-in savings offered by others, Tesco Mobile is going strong on zero upfront costs and low monthly prices for its launch deals, with prices starting at £39.99 for 6GB of data. These offers are exclusively available for Clubcard members, and you get £100 Clubcard points with your order.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: get an extra £100 when you trade-in and another £100 with a discount code
If you have a device you want to trade-in so you can upgrade to one of Samsung's new foldables, then Currys might be a decent place to buy. The retailer is offering an extra £100 when you trade-in an eligible and working handset and pick up a new Fold 8 or Flip 8. Plus, you can use the code 'FOLD100' to get an extra £100 off at the checkout.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 / Fold 8 / Fold 8 Ultra: up to £1,000 off with a trade-in and get £50 when paired with a Watch 9 or Watch Ultra 2
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Recruitment has long relied on signals that serve as proxies for candidate skillsets: degrees, previous job titles, years of experience, and employer names. Those indicators don’t always show whether someone actually has the skills needed for the role they’re applying for. As AI reshapes work, businesses need clearer evidence of what people can do.

This imperative has led to a drastic shift in hiring norms In the UK, 99 per cent of employers are using skills-based hiring in some capacity, according to research. At the same time, 58 per cent expect more than a third of core job skills to change by 2030. Recruiters now need to hire for current requirements while also thinking about how roles are likely to evolve.

For hiring teams, five changes stand out.

1. Hiring is becoming more skills-first

AI is accelerating the move away from degree-first evaluation. When tools, business needs, and ways of working change quickly, employers can’t just rely on static indicators of academic achievement. They need to know whether candidates have practical, current and job-relevant skills.

Degrees still retain significant signaling value. A degree offers an essential foundation, particularly for critical thinking, communication and domain knowledge. But employers increasingly want additional proof that a candidate can apply those strengths in workplace settings.

For recruiters, job descriptions and selection criteria need to become more skill-oriented. Instead of asking for broad experience in a field, businesses should define the specific capabilities needed for the role: data analysis, AI literacy, cloud computing, cybersecurity awareness, project management, or the ability to interpret AI-generated outputs. A clearer skills profile can also help organizations identify strong candidates who have not followed traditional pathways.

2. AI credentials are changing how experience is weighted

Experience still carries weight, but AI is changing how that experience is judged. In fast-moving areas such as generative AI, data, and cloud, a candidate with recent, verified learning may be better prepared than someone with greater experience but outdated skills.

That’s why 42 per cent of UK employers say they would choose a less experienced candidate with a GenAI credential over a more experienced candidate without one. It shows how quickly the value of verified AI capability is rising.

This has practical implications for recruiters. Years of experience shouldn’t be treated as a signifier of readiness. In some roles, recent evidence of applied learning may be more useful. The challenge is to distinguish between candidates who’ve completed primarily theoretical training and those who can show they’re ready to apply what they’ve learned.

3. Verification is becoming more important

AI has made it easier for candidates to produce polished CVs, cover letters and portfolios. It has also made it harder for employers to know which evidence to trust.

This is likely to increase the value of credentials that verify skills to employers. In the UK, 95 per cent of employers say micro-credentials help identify candidates with real-world, applied expertise in areas such as AI, data, and cloud. That matters because recruiters need evidence that can stand up to scrutiny.

The most useful credentials are those that assess applied skills, rather than only content completion. Employers will increasingly look for evidence that a candidate has built something, solved a practical problem or completed a project relevant to workplace needs.

Recruitment teams should reflect this in their processes. CV screening should be supported by practical assessments, structured interviews, and work-sample tasks. This blended approach will make decisions more accurate.

4. Recruiters need to assess human judgement alongside AI skills

AI literacy is becoming a common requirement, but it is insufficient to simply possess technical knowledge, particularly for those deploying AI in non-technical roles. Businesses need people who can work effectively with AI, including knowing when to question it.

As AI becomes embedded in everyday work, candidates will need to show that they can evaluate outputs, check sources, spot weak reasoning, and apply context. A candidate who accepts AI-generated content uncritically will introduce risk, irrespective of technical proficiency.

This adds novel new stages to the assessment process. Recruiters may need to ask candidates to critique an AI-generated response, improve a flawed analysis, or explain what further evidence they’d need before making a decision. These exercises can reveal whether someone has the judgement and domain expertise required to use AI tools responsibly.

For many roles, the differentiator won’t be whether a candidate can prompt a system: it’ll be whether they can turn AI output into sound business action.

5. Skills-first hiring must complement skills-first training

AI is compressing the shelf-life of skills. If, as expected, over a third of core skills will change by 2030 for many UK employers, hiring alone will not be enough to keep pace. In fact, 74 per cent of tech leaders acknowledge they cannot depend on new hires alone to fill AI skills gaps. That means skills-first hiring needs to become part of a wider talent development framework.

The same approach that helps recruiters identify the capabilities needed for a role can also help businesses map the skills they already have, spot gaps across the workforce, and create clearer routes for employees to build the capabilities the organization will need next.

Some capabilities will still need to be brought in from outside the organization, particularly in fast-moving areas such as AI, data and cloud. But many skills will also need to be developed internally as roles evolve. The strongest businesses will combine skills-based hiring with ongoing upskilling, giving employees clear routes to adapt as roles change.

The new recruitment advantage

AI is changing what employers need to know about candidates. Businesses that can identify real capability, verify applied skills, and recognize potential beyond traditional signals will be better placed to hire well. The value of this approach is already visible in workplace outcomes. 92 per cent of employers say entry-level hires with micro-credentials perform better in their first year on the job.

For candidates, the message is just as clear. In an AI-enabled labor market, employability will depend less on what someone once learned and more on what they can prove they can do now, and the evidence they’re still learning.

For employers, recruitment needs to become part of a broader skills strategy. AI may be changing the work, but the hiring challenge remains human: finding people with the skills, judgement and adaptability to help businesses compete and innovate.

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Apple unveiled the very first Mac Pro 20 years ago today, dubbing the computer “the ideal system for the most demanding user.” It was the last Mac to make the transition to Intel processors and put the final nail in the coffin of its PowerPC predecessor — quite a statement at the time.

In fact, the Mac Pro was so powerful that it doubled the performance of the Power Mac G5 that had launched less than a year earlier. Talk about earning that “Pro” moniker.

Many different iterations followed, but the one constant was the positioning. The Mac Pro was always the Mac you went for if money was no object but power was an imperative. It was, seemingly, a computer for the ages.

Or not, as it turned out. In March 2026, Apple officially discontinued the Mac Pro and said it had no plans for any future models. It was an ignominious end to the most powerful Mac Apple has ever made.

The very nature of the Mac Pro had always made it vulnerable. But that vulnerability proved to be fatal when combined with market conditions that even a giant like Apple is struggling to deal with today. When we look back at why the Mac Pro (just) failed to make it to 20 years old, there’s one very obvious culprit.

A dangerously niche product

(Image credit: Joseph Greve / Unsplash)

Right from the off, the Mac Pro was designed to be used by people in challenging professions who valued performance above all else. It was made to complement the eye-watering powers of the best Intel chips of the day, which offered far more in the way of output than the PowerPC processors Apple had previously been using.

That meant that the Mac Pro was always a niche product that flaunted its raw power. That was the point of the machine, and although the general public liked to poke fun at its sky-high prices (remember the $400 wheels on the 2019 model?), its intended audience didn’t much care. When your work consists of high-grade film productions, artificial intelligence (AI) data crunching or similarly demanding pursuits, high prices are just the cost of doing business.

But that niche nature meant the Mac Pro was never going to sell on the scale of the MacBook Air or the MacBook Pro. Apple was always taking a calculated risk, determining that it was worth going after a small but loyal audience who craved the Mac Pro’s power and reliability — and would continue to do so over the years.

The problem, though, was that Apple often seemed to take these users for granted. The cylindrical model introduced in 2013 — nicknamed the “trash can” Mac Pro for its tubular shape — went years without an update because, Apple later admitted, the company had “designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner”.

Amazingly, the 2013 model wasn’t updated until six years later — a veritable lifetime in computing terms — when the final design iteration of the Mac Pro finally touched down.

The introduction of the Mac Studio also caused a massive problem for the Mac Pro. Its performance was just as good as the Mac Pro, if not better, yet it came in a smaller package that cost far less. The choice for many people was clear.

With the transition to Apple silicon, add-in extras like the Apple Afterburner Card were no longer feasible, meaning the Mac Pro’s only real advantage was its inclusion of a few expansion options like PCIe. But when you’re paying a minimum of $6,999, those returns make less and less sense when compared with a Mac Studio.

Apple had long walked the fine line between infrequent updates and outright abandonment, but still it kept chugging away at the Mac Pro, even after the Mac Studio’s arrival. Instead, it was an external force that finally killed off the Mac Pro — and forced a complete rethink from Apple.

Buried in the dark

(Image credit: Apple)

On March 26, 2026, news emerged that Apple had discontinued the Mac Pro. The company explained to 9to5Mac that it also had “no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware,” seemingly sounding the computer’s death knell for good.

The timing might have seemed strange, and it certainly seemed to come out of the blue. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can gain a pretty good idea of what happened and why Apple made the move when it did.

That’s because just three months later, Apple announced bombshell price rises that affected nearly every device it sold.

The Mac range was badly hit, with high-end devices like the Mac Studio coming in for particularly stinging increases. That device saw the single highest price jump by far, rocketing up by a painful $1,300 for the M3 Ultra model. The MacBook Pro, meanwhile, rose $300, the second-highest dollar increase of any Apple product.

These price adjustments weren’t made on a whim. No, they were prompted by the widespread component crisis that’s currently ravaging the entire computing industry.

Parts are getting more expensive by the day thanks to the overwhelming demand from AI data centers. Things are so bad that Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke out, calling the situation “unsustainable” and describing his company’s price increases as “unavoidable”.

(Image credit: Far Chinberdiev / Unsplash)

When you see how badly pro users were affected by these changes, Apple’s decision to ditch the Mac Pro starts to make a lot more sense. If the Mac Studio now costs $1,300 more than it did previously — a figure that ballooned by almost 33% — what kind of wince-inducing costs would Mac Pro users be faced with had Apple continued to sell the device?

Going with that same 33% jump, we could have been looking at a Mac Pro that started at around $9,299. That’s a roughly 33% step up over the Mac Pro’s old entry price of $6,999. And we’re not even talking about any upgrades here — no beefed-up CPU or additional storage, not even any ultra-premium wheels. Just the base-level Mac Pro and nothing more.

When you think about it like that, it’s obvious why the Mac Pro was killed off just shy of its 20th anniversary. If Apple waited for the computer’s birthday, it would have been forced to escalate its price to frankly outrageous heights alongside all the other affected products.

And in the cut-throat world of business, that would have been a no-go considering the prices we’re talking about here. The Mac Pro was already selling in vanishingly small numbers. Boost its price by 33% — or even 20% — and its sales would have fallen off a cliff. The only thing a move like that would have generated is a torrent of bad press for very little positive return.

So in the end, Apple didn’t afford the Mac Pro a sentimental 20th birthday celebration. Given the ongoing memory crisis and its wide-ranging effects on the entire computing industry, there was no room to stand on ceremony. The Mac Pro was buried in the dark — before its price could become even more contentious.

• Kit Connor has reportedly joined Marvel's new X-Men movie
• The Heartstopper star is said to be playing Scott Summers/ Cyclops
• He joins Sadie Sink and Samara Weaving as part of the hotly-anticipated MCU film

Marvel has reportedly found the star it wants to portray beloved X-Men member Scott Summers/ Cyclops in its cinematic universe.

Per Deadline, Heartstopper actor Kit Connor has been hired to play the mutant group's in-the-field leader. Typically, Marvel hasn't commented on the report, but Deadline is extremely reliable when it comes to casting updates. It stands to reason, then, that Connor is the latest star to land a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

If true, Connor will be the third actor to sign on for the new X-Men movie. Sadie Sink, who was confirmed to be the MCU's version of Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is all but locked in for a role in Marvel's mutant-starring flick. Meanwhile, Samara Weaving was reportedly cast as popular superhuman Emma Frost on July 31, with Deadline again being the first to break the news of her apparent involvement.

Little else is known about Marvel's X-Men film reboot. According to Variety, though, the comic giant has ambitions on releasing it as the first project of Marvel Phase 7. If true, the untitled flick will precede the Ryan Gosling-starring Ghost Rider and David Jonsson-led Black Panther III, both of which are primed to arrive in 2028.

An ever-evolving line-up

Sadie Sink should reprise her role as Jean Grey in Marvel's X-Men movie reboot (Image credit: Marvel Studios/Sony Pictures)

Marvel may have locked in Sink, Weaving, and Connor for its forthcoming X-Men film, but fans are desperate to learn who else will feature alongside them.

Speculation has been rife about which other stars could appear, and you can catch up on the biggest rumors by reading my guide on everything we know so far about Marvel's new X-Men movie. Nonetheless, myriad new rumors have circulated online since news of Connor's involvement broke — and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some truth to all of them.

For starters, comic book creator Rob Liefeld took to X/ Twitter to write he'd heard that Inde Navarrette had officially signed on for the project. Liefeld's comments come weeks after the breakout star of Obsession confirmed she'd met with X-Men movie director Jake Schreier and, more recently, threw her hat in the ring to play Mystique.

Just gonna get it out of the way say I was also wrong about Pelphrey as Xavier. I heard a different name that’s not Skarsgard and that name is going around already so I’m sure it’ll leak soon but I’ll let it come out on its own. https://t.co/6bmdqgcD4yAugust 7, 2026

Elsewhere, trustworthy industry insider Apocalyptic Horseman has walked back on Tom Pelphrey (Task, Iron Fist) playing Charles Xavier/ Professor X, while another leaker in Caleb Williams has claimed that fan-favorite mutant Gambit won't be part of proceedings.

Meanwhile, on the latest edition of The Hot Mic podcast, the less-reliable Jeff Sneider has suggested Charles Melton (Beef season 2) is set to play Beast. Fellow podcast host John Rocha has also heard that Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus, Beef season 2) has been tapped to portray Rogue, although Sneider believes she hasn't been.

Lastly, Sneider has indicated that Bill Skarsgard (It, Nosferatu), Ethan Hawke (Moon Knight, Blue Moon) and Jonathan Groff (Frozen, Wicked) are all in the running to play Professor X. Rocha, though, has heard Skarsgard isn't being looked at for that highly-coveted position.

As the X-Men casting rumor mill continues to capture everyone's attention, it might not be long until Marvel puts a pin in the speculation.

Indeed, with the 2026 edition of D23 Expo, aka the so-called ultimate fan event for Disney diehards that takes place every two years, being held between August 14 and 16, some fans believe Marvel will announce the film's full roster during said event. Let's hope that comes to pass because, I don't know about you, but I can't take many more months' of conjecture.

Want to see how the latest Spider-Man film tentatively sets up the next X-Men movie? Read my Spider-Man: Brand New Day ending explained piece. Once you're done, find out how to watch the X-Men movies in order.

• A new PlayStation 5 firmware update has been released for testing
• The update automatically enables PSSR 2.0 on PS5 Pro, even for games that support the previous version of PSSR
• This means better image quality for titles yet to receive the 2.0 upgrade

Sony has released a new PlayStation 5 firmware update for its beta program that automatically enables PSSR 2.0 (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) on PS5 Pro.

That's according to a new ResetEra post, which claims that emails have been sent to beta users allowing them to test out the upcoming features before they're released.

The most significant update is the addition of PSSR 2.0, the latest version of Sony's enhanced-performance technology, built for PS5 Pro. With this beta firmware patch, the 'Enhance PSSR Image Quality' option is automatically enabled by default, but can be toggled on or off in the settings menu.

As per the patch notes (thanks, PushSquare), when players enable this feature, enhanced PSSR is used "even for games that support the previous version of PSSR so you can enjoy a sharper and clearer visual experience."

PSSR 2.0 began rolling out in February, with Resident Evil Requiem becoming the first game to receive the update before a handful of other titles.

"The upgraded PSSR represents another step in our commitment to evolving the PS5 Pro experience," Sony said at the time. "Moving forward, most new PS5 Pro titles will launch with support for this enhanced PSSR, ensuring players continue to see improvements in image quality and performance."

Supported games include Silent Hill f, Monster Hunter Wilds, Dragon's Dogma 2, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Control, Alan Wake 2, and more.

With the latest PS5 Pro beta update, players will be able to enjoy improved image quality for PSSR-supported games yet to be upgraded to PSSR 2.0.

Alongside this feature, Sony has added an option to turn off Bluetooth in certain countries or regions, in order to manage controller connections at esports venues and similar locations. You can check out the full patch notes below.

• We've turned on Enhance PSSR Image Quality as a default setting. When you update the system software, this setting automatically turns on. When you enable this feature, enhanced PSSR is used even for games that support the previous version of PSSR so you can enjoy a sharper and clearer visual experience.　
  • To turn off this setting, go to Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output > Enhance PSSR Image Quality.
  • This feature is available only on PS5 Pro.
• We’ve changed the following features for PS5 consoles and PS5 Pro consoles in certain countries or regions.
  • If you go to Settings > Accessories > General > Advance Settings and select Turn Off Bluetooth, you’re no longer able to put your console into rest mode. Additionally, HDMI link is no longer supported when you select Turn Off Bluetooth.
  • The Turn Off Bluetooth function is for managing controller connections at esports venues and similar locations. Do not use this feature for any other purpose.
• We've improved system software performance and stability.

• Swiss government confirms attackers breached BIT’s SharePoint servers
• Investigators suspect exploitation of recent SharePoint flaws
• No sensitive or confidential data is believed to have been stored on the platform

Cybercriminals broke into the IT network of the Swiss government and stole data from roughly 200 accounts. As a result, the Swiss government disconnected some of its servers from the wider internet and launched an investigation.

In an announcement, the Swiss government said that on July 28 2026 its security specialists noticed “abnormalities” in the Federal Office for Information Technology and Telecommunication’s (BIT) SharePoint servers.

Three days later, on July 31, the investigators determined that the attackers accessed data found in around 200 accounts, both user and technical.

Two vulnerabilities

The investigation is currently ongoing, the agency said, adding that it is getting support from Microsoft, as well. So far, the identity of the attackers is unknown, and the stolen data has not yet leaked to the dark web.

“No confidential information or particularly sensitive personal data may be stored on the SharePoint platform,” the announcement reads.

While BIT has not yet determined the initial access vector, it suspects it to be one of two flaws in SharePoint that Microsoft fixed last month:

“In mid-July, Microsoft announced several vulnerabilities in SharePoint,” it says in the announcement. “After the publication of the corresponding security updates, the FOITT immediately started work on importing them into its own systems.”

“The cyberattack was carried out by previously unknown actors, which was presumably made possible by exploiting these vulnerabilities in the SharePoint software.” It did not say which vulnerabilities those are, but in its report, BleepingComputer says that it could be one of these two: CVE-2026-56164 (an actively exploited privilege escalation vulnerability), or CVE-2026-50522 (a critical remote code execution flaw later exploited to steal SharePoint machine keys and maintain access after servers were patched).

Given its popularity among businesses of all sizes, SharePoint is a major target for cybercriminals. So far, no threat actors claimed responsibility for the attack, or demanded any ransom in exchange for the stolen data.

Via BleepingComputer

Suno, the most popular AI music creation tool, spent years making it incredibly easy to generate music. Now it's introducing download limits, watermarking and fingerprinting to stop people flooding streaming services with AI slop.

That suggests something important to me: even the companies building generative AI are starting to realize unlimited AI creation comes with unintended consequences.

Suno CEO, Mikey Shulman, shared a blog post about the company's principles for building the future of music responsibly. He says “AI should help people create something new, not imitate someone else’s work. This philosophy has guided how we’ve built our models and platform from the start.”

(Image credit: Suno)Great music is made by people

In a section titled “Our Principles”, Shulman says that “great music is made by people”.

The principles themselves aren't new. What's new is that Suno is now dedicating significant engineering effort to limiting abuse rather than simply enabling creation.

In his blog post Shulman writes “We will soon introduce a new downloads policy designed to limit the ability to mass distribute songs on streaming platforms, while preserving the professional, creative, and personal ways people use Suno. These changes won’t affect the vast majority of our users, but they will make large-scale abuse much harder.”

Schulman continues: “In the coming weeks, we will also be adopting new audio watermarking and fingerprinting technology so we can partner even more closely with distribution platforms on combatting fraud and misuse.”

That evolution fits the broader trend we’ve been covering from the music streaming services like Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, and Qobuz, who have started to fight back against AI-generated music flooding their platforms.

Managing the consequences

Streaming giant Tidal has published a comprehensive AI policy with the strapline "Promoting Fairness and Economic Empowerment in the Era of AI-Generated Music". Tidal will identify it, tag it and crucially, not pay any streaming royalties for it.

Spotfiy has introduced measures to prevent fraudulent streams and AI impersonation . Deezer announced that over half of all new daily uploads to its site are AI — up from 44% in April and just over 30% at the end of last year. It launched a free site to scan your playlists for AI in June. Qobuz has announced that it is taking a human-first approach to its recommendations and “developing detection and monitoring systems to identify AI-generated content and fraudulent streaming patterns.”

This announcement from Suno feels more significant than another AI company publishing a set of principles. It marks a shift in priorities. For the first few years of generative AI, success was measured by how much content these systems could produce. Now it looks like success is being measured by how effectively companies can prevent that content from overwhelming everything else.

The AI music industry is moving from maximizing generation to managing the consequences of generation, and it's about time.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving. Across industries, many organizations are increasingly deploying AI into systems that must run continuously, securely, and at scale.

As AI adoption accelerates, one thing is becoming clear: infrastructure planning cannot wait.

AI workloads are becoming more interconnected, distributed, and operationally integrated across cloud, data center, and edge environments. Infrastructure planning now requires organizations to align compute, networking, software, memory, and operational requirements across increasingly complex environments.

As a result, many enterprises are beginning infrastructure planning sooner rather than later.

The cost of waiting

As AI becomes more integrated into everyday business operations through continuous inference and agentic AI systems, infrastructure demands are evolving significantly.

Modern AI deployments increasingly require:

• Continuous inference running around the clock
• Multi-agent systems coordinating across applications and databases
• Real-time orchestration across cloud, data center, and edge environments
• Strong governance, security, and operational efficiency

These workloads require more than raw compute performance. They require balanced infrastructure where compute, networking, software, memory, and operational workflows work cohesively at scale.

Because of this, enterprises are beginning AI infrastructure planning earlier, recognizing that planning, testing, and Proof of Concepts (PoCs) for complex systems like this take time.

At the same time, the cost of delaying AI infrastructure planning is becoming more apparent. Delays can slow deployment readiness and postpone AI-driven benefits such as productivity gains and operational automation. As AI demand continues to rise, organizations are prioritizing earlier planning to secure the compute capacity needed to support long-term AI growth.

As AI infrastructure becomes more complex, infrastructure planning needs to begin earlier than traditional IT upgrade cycles. Evaluating workloads, validating deployment models, and ensuring scalability across environments takes time and time is of the essence if we want to be ahead of our competitors.

AI is now a systems challenge

The conversation around AI infrastructure often begins with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). But as deployments scale, AI performance depends not on individual components, but on how the entire system operates together.

Modern AI infrastructure relies on Central Processing Units (CPUs) for orchestration and data movement, GPUs for large-scale parallel compute, high-speed networking for low-latency communication across systems, and open software platforms for portability and scalability.

As AI systems become more distributed and inference-driven, orchestration and system balance become critical. CPUs play a pivotal role in managing workload coordination, memory access, and GPU utilization, ensuring infrastructure operates efficiently under sustained demand.

This shift reflects a broader industry reality: AI is no longer just a GPU problem. It is a full-stack infrastructure challenge that organization must tackle early on.

Planning for distributed AI

AI is also scaling in multiple directions at once.

Some workloads are expanding into large, centralized clusters, while others are moving closer to where data is generated – including edge deployments such as in factories or hospitals, and AI-enabled endpoints like the PCs.

For organizations, this creates unique infrastructure considerations around hybrid cloud, on-premises deployments, edge AI, compliance, and latency-sensitive applications.

This diversity underscores the importance of infrastructure strategies designed for modularity, portability, and adaptability that necessitates upfront planning.

Openness and flexibility matter more than ever

As AI innovation accelerates, organizations are prioritizing infrastructure flexibility to support rapidly evolving models, frameworks, and deployment environments.

Open ecosystems can reduce integration complexity while supporting broader compatibility across software frameworks, cloud environments, and deployment architectures. They also provide greater flexibility to evolve infrastructure strategies over time while helping avoid the migration costs that can come with highly closed or single-vendor environments.

For many organizations, openness is no longer just a developer preference. It is becoming an important consideration for balancing performance, operational efficiency, cost optimization, and long-term infrastructure investment.

This is another reason infrastructure planning must happen early. Building AI environments that remain scalable, portable, and adaptable over time require long-term thinking around openness and interoperability from the beginning.

Infrastructure readiness will define the next phase of AI

The next phase of AI growth will reward organizations that take a proactive approach to infrastructure planning.

Organizations that delay infrastructure planning may find it more challenging to deploy AI tools down the road, not only due to not having ample time to plan and test, but not securing the compute resources needed early on.

The cost of waiting is becoming ever clearer.

Ultimately, the companies that succeed in the next phase of AI will not necessarily be those with the largest clusters, but those that plan early and build balanced, scalable, and open infrastructure designed to support continuous innovation in an increasingly AI-driven economy.

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Every four years, football's best players are tested on the world's biggest stage.

Less visible is the test taking place behind the scenes.

As billions tune in, broadcasters and streaming platforms face their own high-stakes challenge: delivering seamless live experiences at a scale few events can match.

FIFA estimates that around 5 billion people engaged with the 2022 World Cup, with the final alone reaching nearly 1.5 billion viewers worldwide.

In 2026, that audience has been presented with an even bigger tournament: 48 teams playing 104 matches across Canada, Mexico and the United States.

More than 54 million viewers across the three host countries watched their national teams' opening matches, while the United States' game against Paraguay drew a combined 27.5 million across FOX and Telemundo, the most-watched FIFA World Cup match ever broadcast in the country.

By the end of the group stage, 4.64 million spectators had filled 99.7% of available seats. That scale is a real-time stress test for every part of the live-video ecosystem.

From passive viewing to active participation

Beyond sheer audience size, the difference lies in how fans consume it. They no longer simply watch. They move between platforms, share highlights, expect instant access to key moments and want experiences tailored to their own interests.

Streaming is no longer just a distribution channel; it's a product in its own right. Brazil’s group-stage match against Haiti reached 51.3 million viewers across Globo's wider media ecosystem, while CazéTV set a worldwide YouTube record for the most-watched football match streamed on the platform.

World Cup content generated 11 billion video views across social media platforms during the group stage alone, and official broadcasters published more than 44,000 pieces of content on TikTok.

A modern match is simultaneously a live program, a source of social clips, a statistics feed and a second-screen experience.

Rethinking the production workflow

That shift starts with the production workflow. The same match is now produced simultaneously for stadium scoreboards, connected TVs, mobile apps and global streaming platforms, with capture, ingestion, encoding and delivery all part of a single content pipeline.

Sixteen optical tracking cameras installed in each stadium can produce more than 150 million data points per match, helping officials review incidents and giving media partners new ways to produce highlights.

The real challenge is bringing together live delivery, audience data, advertising, captions, multi-language audio, and interactive experiences alongside tracking, commentary, graphics, and officiating data.

What fans expect: reliability, personalization, speed

For viewers, success comes down to three things: reliability at scale, personalization and speed. Fans will tolerate a lot, but they won't forgive a stream that buffers during a decisive goal or runs so far behind live play that social media spoils the moment.

Personalization must happen without undermining performance, delivering different recommendations, languages, statistics, camera feeds and advertising while maintaining the resilience of a mass broadcast.

AI is reshaping live sports production

Artificial intelligence is central to delivering those expectations. Rather than replacing production teams, AI is enabling rights holders to produce and distribute content at a scale that would previously have required far larger operations. Automated highlight clipping is one of the clearest examples: AI can identify key moments, package them and distribute them within minutes.

For rights holders, the difference between publishing a goal two minutes after it's scored rather than twenty is the difference between leading the conversation and chasing it. Match summaries, commentary, captions and translations can also be generated automatically, and platforms can match each fan with the content they are most likely to watch next.

A glimpse of the future: personalized sports at scale

The broader ambition is visible at the top of the game. The PGA TOUR now turns each week's action into roughly 7,000 AI-generated highlight clips across dozens of markets, so a fan can follow one player or catch up on key moments without waiting for the main broadcast. The 2026 World Cup has produced a similarly vast library of stories. A record 215 goals were scored during the group stage, an average of three per match.

Tournament debutants Cabo Verde went undefeated, with Kevin Pina scoring the country's first World Cup goal, while Japan's 4-0 victory over Tunisia was both the 1,000th match in World Cup history and the biggest ever by an Asian team. These are exactly the kinds of stories that automated tagging, rapid clipping and intelligent recommendations can bring to the right audience.

Immersive viewing and accessibility

The next generation of live sports streaming will be defined by richer viewing experiences. Multi-view streaming allows fans to follow simultaneous matches, while alternative camera angles and player-specific feeds provide greater control over how the action is consumed.

Real-time data integration can bring live statistics directly into the viewing experience without interrupting the match. AI is also making captioning, translation, and audio description production-ready at scale, allowing broadcasters to localize live coverage without a proportional increase in costs.

However, human oversight remains essential for names, sporting terminology, and cultural context.

The technology behind global scale

Supporting all of this requires resilient IT infrastructure and scalable delivery platforms capable of broadcast-quality reliability and low latency, even as millions connect simultaneously. It also requires organizations to move beyond fragmented technology stacks.

A unified architecture makes content easier to reuse: one live signal can support a full broadcast, mobile highlights, social clips, advertising inventory, archive content and personalized recommendations.

Furthermore, protecting that content is just as important as delivering it. Live sport is uniquely vulnerable to piracy because its commercial value exists almost entirely during the match. Digital Rights Management remains the foundation, but forensic watermarking is becoming increasingly important, embedding invisible identifiers so pirated feeds can be traced and removed while the event is still live.

What's next: The future of live sport at scale

The World Cup ultimately highlights that live video has become a complex, data-driven product where success is no longer defined solely by picture quality or reach, but by how effectively AI, unified content workflows. and scalable technology work together under pressure.

The challenge for the industry is not understanding what works at World Cup scale, but applying those lessons consistently across every live event.

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When was the last time you met your newest hire in person?

For many organizations, particularly those operating remotely, the answer is increasingly never. With one in five companies worldwide adopting a fully remote model, hiring virtually has become increasingly popular, enabling businesses to access global talent pools and scale faster than ever before.

But in removing geography as a constraint, it has also stripped away one of the most fundamental layers of trust: the ability to verify, face-to-face, who you are actually employing.

This shift is giving rise to a new and largely under-recognized threat, the “deepfake employee”, where threat actors use synthetic identities, voice cloning, and real-time deepfake video to pass interviews and secure legitimate employment.

Accelerated by advancements in AI, it is now possible to create convincing digital personas at scale, lowering the barrier to entry for fraud and enabling highly organized operations to target corporate hiring pipelines.

In practice, these attacks can be surprisingly difficult to detect. A candidate may appear on a video interview with a natural-looking face and voice, answer questions fluently, and provide what seem to be legitimate credentials. Behind the scenes, however, AI tools can subtly alter facial expressions, sync lip movements to a cloned voice, or even feed real-time responses.

To the hiring manager, there is little reason to suspect anything is wrong. The deception often only becomes apparent much later, if at all, when activity inside the organization begins to raise concerns.

This risk is already playing out in the real world. In a recent experiment, a cybersecurity expert used AI to create deepfake personas – one a white man similar to himself and another of an Asian woman, and successfully secured two separate tech roles, beating hundreds of other candidates.

Using AI-generated credentials, real-time voice modulation and live deepfake video, both synthetic identities progressed through interview stages undetected, with employers unaware they were interacting with an entirely fabricated candidate.

Cloudflare’s latest threat research highlights the scale and sophistication of this activity. Organized “remote worker” fraud operations are using fabricated identities, deepfake-assisted interviews and remote access “laptop farms” to infiltrate payrolls. In some cases, multiple individuals operate behind a single employee identity, maintaining persistent access while appearing as one consistent, legitimate user.

Once hired, these actors are no longer external attackers. They become insider threats with valid credentials, company-issued devices and trusted access to systems. As Cloudflare notes, by the time these individuals are identified, they are already operating inside the perimeter, often blending in with normal business activity.

What needs to change

With nearly 60% of organizations having experienced deepfake-driven incidents, and 48% reporting damage from AI-generated impersonation or misinformation, it is clear that identity infrastructure has become a primary attack surface. Attackers are shifting away from “breaking in” to “logging in” using legitimate credentials obtained through deception.

At the heat of this issue is the flawed assumption that identity can be verified once and then trusted indefinitely.

In physical environments, identity is rarely in doubt. You can see who walks through the door, recognize familiar faces and detect inconsistencies in behavior. In virtual environments, however, organizations rely almost entirely on screen names, login credentials and video, none of which reliably confirm who is actually behind the screen.

Accounts can be shared, credentials can be compromised, and even live video can be manipulated.

This creates a critical vulnerability at the point of hire. A candidate may present documentation, pass background checks and complete onboarding, but in a world of synthetic identities, that initial verification is no longer enough.

Building continuous identity assurance

To address this challenge, organizations need to move beyond static identity checks and towards continuous identity verification. This means verifying not only who someone is who they say they are and that they are a real human at the point of hire, but ensuring that the same individual remains present and authentic throughout their interactions with the organization.

The strongest form of defense lies in continuous biometric verification of the user’s identity. Rather than relying on a single factor, such as facial recognition or voice authentication alone, fused biometrics combines multiple identity signals, such as facial characteristics, voice patterns and behavioral cues, into a single, layered verification process, verifying directly that a real, live human is there.

It is no longer enough to confirm a person’s identity at a single moment in time. Organizations need confidence that the same individual is consistently present across every critical interaction, from interviews and onboarding, through to system access and sensitive transactions. Without this continuity, identities can be shared, replaced or hijacked without detection.

Fused biometric verification can create layered validation that is significantly harder to replicate or manipulate, enabling it to detect and block attempts to impersonate users through synthetic voices, deepfakes, or recorded audio and video.

While a single modality might be fooled by a sophisticated synthetic input, combining biometric modalities; facial recognition, voice recognition, and speech pattern recognition, it becomes significantly harder for fraudsters to mimic an identity.

Advanced biometric verification technologies are trained on large datasets of both genuine and synthetic voice samples, enabling them to recognize subtle acoustic differences between natural and deepfake voices. This helps organizations detect voice-cloning attempts, even when the audio sounds convincing to human listeners.

Crucially, fused biometric verification can operate passively in the background, consistently verifying that the right person is accessing systems, enabling smoother, lower-friction experiences and reduces the need for frustrating repeated verification attempts.

As organizations continue to embrace remote work and digital-first operations, cybercriminals will increasingly find new vulnerabilities to exploit. The question is no longer just how to keep threats out, but also how to ensure that those already inside are truly who they claim to be.

In a world where identities can be fabricated, cloned and manipulated with ease, trust cannot remain static. It must be continuously proven.

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• Ministers in the UK are consulting on workplace monitoring technologies
• Employers may have to ask permission to implement surveillance tools that ensure employees are working as contracted
• The consultation includes references to the use of artificial intelligence-assisted monitoring

The British government’s Make Work Pay strategy to overhaul employment rights and end exploitative work practices has opened consultation on workplace monitoring technologies, with the Department for Business and Trade seeking to establish whether existing rules covering things like biometric surveillance, keystroke logging, and productivity scoring are fit for purpose.

Current rules over the use of workplace monitoring technology (WMT) may be fit for purpose, but the consultation aims to establish whether non-statutory guidance, a formal code of practice, or a legal framework is required.

The consultation – which also cites artificial intelligence as a tool to assist monitoring, closes September 30, 2026.

Identifying WMT

Workplace monitoring technologies have developed with the pace of digital expansion in offices and factories, with notable examples including email and web tracking, along with controversial tools such as keystroke logging, and screen and app monitoring.

Mobile workers and couriers are also subjected to GPS monitoring, while access to workplaces is typically subject to biometric credentials, a modern-day version of “clocking in.”

So, monitoring practices in the workplace are nothing new, and CCTV has long been used to observe location, activity, and appropriate behavior. Responses to the consultation will no doubt include concerns over the expansion of these technologies into the remote workspace, where tools like keystroke loggers and screen monitoring are considered intrusive.

Meet the AI boss

Furthermore, some new considerations, such as automated decision-making (ADM, which can make decisions without human involvement) and algorithmic management (tools that can, for example, alter shifts based on availability and performance) will also come under review with the consultation.

The consultation announcement states:

"AI and innovation are central to the government’s strategy for growth. The Chancellor has prioritised AI adoption, as where the biggest gains lie for UK growth, and has set the ambition for the UK to be the fastest adopter of AI in the G7. To support rapid and responsible adoption, we are focused on creating the right conditions, providing the necessary infrastructure and managing the technology transition fairly and carefully."

Additional regulatory requirements

While the consultation is welcome and gives employers and employees the chance to deliver their thoughts – and affords the Labour government the opportunity to underline its Make Work Pay policies – the end result will inevitably means more regulatory work for employers.

Non-statutory guidance would be the preference, as this has a smaller impact in a workplace that already has to consider GDPR and the EU AI Act. Larger organizations also need to accommodate local employment laws. But there is every chance that the eventual decision will result in the introduction of a statutory policy governing workplace monitoring technologies, particularly where AI is concerned.

• AI is opening to the door to advertising on streaming TV platforms for SMBs
• 37% of small and medium businesses feel cross border campaigns are more accessible thanks to AI
• SMBs see AI as key tool in remaining competitive in the future

Barriers to cross-border and multi-region advertising are being broken by AI, according to a new survey by Amazon Ads.

Surveying 4,100 respondents across 14 countries, the results found nearly three-quarters (73%) of UK SMBs have found that AI advertising tools make streaming TV an affordable and accessible platform for their promotional messaging.

The questions focus on the difference between advertising accessibility in 2026 compared with 3 years ago, when 69% found cost to be the main barrier against streaming TV advertising access.

How does AI help SMBs advertise?

Now, over half of SMBs (54%) interested in advertising on TV believe that AI tools can enable them to reach new audiences and increase brand awareness (53%). Meanwhile, a majority of SMBs believe AI can be instrumental in expanding their competitiveness.

Amazon Ads employs AI tools to create and manage AI campaigns, as well as improve opimization and targeting. It offers image and video generation solutions to create realistic visuals and uses a chatbot (“conversational agent”) to develop concepts and scripts with the advertiser.

The survey also found 68% of UK SMBs found AI advertising has supported growth, and 52% highlight that it has supported expansion into other countries. Of those surveyed, 37% stated that cross-border campaigns seemed out of reach just three years ago.

"What we're seeing is a real shift in confidence among small and medium-sized businesses," noted Cyril Clerget, General Manager of Global SMB Advertising at Amazon Ads. "AI-powered tools are helping them explore advertising channels — like streaming TV — that once felt out of reach.”

The survey has also found that 88% of SMBs are planning to use AI for creating adverts, and 74% aim to use the technology to produce streaming ads. Interestingly, the survey also found that 45% intend to use AI for competitor analysis in the future.

Is AI the future of affordable advertising?

Affordable AI tools seem to be an attractive prospect for SMBs wishing to aim for streaming TV. Over the past few years, radio advertising has become more targeted thanks to increasing numbers of digital stations, with advertisers able to tailor to specific demographics.

Streaming TV offers a similar curation, and 75% of surveyed UK SMBs see AI as the answer to improving their future competitiveness.