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Democrats in Michigan are considering their options after Haley Stevens endorsed GOP candidate Mike Rogers for Senate. And the Gulf states are bracing for a possible U.S. attack on Iran after the midterms.

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• Amazon's 'Ask this book' feature is now rolling out to Kindles
• It's part of software version 5.20.2
• So far, users have only reported this landing on 2026 models, and it might currently be US-exclusive

Amazon launched ‘Ask this book’ almost a year ago now, with this AI-powered tool allowing you to ask questions about what you’re reading. However, it was initially only available for the iOS Kindle app, and only in the US.

Now, though, that availability is widening — at least a little. As spotted by some Reddit users and The eBook Reader, ‘Ask this book’ has started rolling out to certain Kindle models, including the Kindle Colorsoft 2026 and the Kindle Paperwhite 2026. It’s likely that the other 2026 Kindles will also receive this update, though that hasn’t been confirmed.

Indeed, Amazon itself has so far said very little about this rollout. The feature is part of software version 5.20.2, but this doesn’t yet have any release notes, or any confirmation beyond user reports of which models ‘Ask this book’ will actually work with.

(Image credit: Amazon / The eBook Reader)Unclear availability

So, for now, there’s a question mark over whether the feature is coming to previous Kindle generations — I can say that my Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition 2024 does not yet have the update. But then it’s a UK model, and previously, the feature had only been available in the US — so it also remains to be seen whether other regions will get it.

For now, if you’re curious, you’ll seemingly have to wait and see whether your Kindle gets the update pushed to it — there is no way to force the update currently. The rollout might happen in stages, though, so even if you don’t have it yet, you may still get it. Just make sure Wi-Fi is on so your Kindle can update.

As for the ‘Ask this book’ feature itself, it’s potentially very useful, letting you, for example, ask about the plot or characters of a supported book and receive information based on where you’re up to in it — or for the whole book if you don’t mind spoilers.

As with most AI features, though, it’s also controversial, with Reddit comments about its original launch including “I hate it,” and “this feature is so invasive.” So it’s certainly not for everyone.

What happens in California could shape how America taxes the superrich. But will its billionaire tax fill state coffers — or drain them?

(Image credit: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

Microsoft Edge now launches up to 15% faster on eligible Windows 11 PCs, with greater gains under heavy workloads. Here's when the improvement applies.

The post Microsoft Says Edge Opens 15% Faster on Windows 11 — Here’s When You’ll Notice It appeared first on TechRepublic.

• Custom AI behaviors have arrived in the Philips Hue app
• At the moment you can't edit what the AI creates
• AI features require the Hue Bridge Pro

When we spoke to Hue founder and head of technology George Yianni in September, he told us about some exciting new features coming to the Hue ecosystem including Custom AI Behaviors. And now they've arrived in the Hue app, provided that you have the Hue Bridge Pro.

Yianni told us that AI would be "a bit of a game changer" for the platform, and said of the custom behaviors that "natural language is a fantastic way to just describe arbitrarily how you would like your home to behave, and then we can use AI to translate that into a special programming language we’ve developed that runs the automation in the Bridge."

According to Yianni, "I now can finally have my home behave exactly the way I wanted to. I think that's a really big deal." But unfortunately according to HueBlog, the behaviors aren't quite behaving the way we'd like them to.

The new AI features require the Hue Bridge Pro. (Image credit: Future / Philips)How to use Philips Hue Custom AI Behaviors

The idea behind Custom AI Behaviors is simple: tell the AI what you want and the AI will craft the appropriate behavior for you and add it to the app. For example, you could tell the AI that you want specific lights to go on at sunset, and to use different color themes each time.

That's what Hueblog tried, and the AI understood the mission. But unfortunately it didn't quite get it right: instead of turning on only the specified lights, the behavior turned all the lights on. When Hueblog tried to get the AI to fix the issue "it gave up and simply displayed the error message."

It looks like the goal — use AI to make things simple — is perhaps too simple, because as Hueblog put it "you’re entirely limited by the AI’s logic and reasoning. If it doesn’t cooperate, you’re out of luck." Unlike, say, Apple's Shortcuts on macOS and iOS, there's no way to tweak the shortcuts the AI has created if they're not quite doing what you want.

This feels like a typical version 1.0 issue, where a feature is rolled out first and then updated based on user feedback. That means the no-tweaking issue is likely to be short-lived: in my experience Hue's pretty good at updating its app to deliver new features.

While the new AI features — the new Custom AI Behaviors and the previously launched SpatialAware scene optimization — are reserved for the Hue Bridge Pro, the app also provides updates for all Hue users including easier Screen Sync setup and improved scene recommendations. As ever the Hue app is available for both iOS and Android.

You don't need to be a tech expert to know that the Nintendo Switch 2 will be one of the most sought-after items in this year's Black Friday sales. And although we're now in November, I wasn't expecting to see any deals for a few weeks. But two surprisingly strong Nintendo Switch 2 bundles are already available at the official Nintendo Store, which I think will rival anything we see during this month's sales.

• View all Switch 2 bundle deals at Nintendo

The first brings together a Nintendo Switch 2 console, a copy of Mario Kart World, a 256GB Samsung microSD card, and a Nintendo Switch 2 Camera for £459.99. That's a total saving of almost £95 compared with buying these items individually.

As for the second bundle, you can get a Switch 2, a copy of Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, a 256GB Samsung microSD card, and a Nintendo Switch 2 Camera for £449.99. Oh, and let's not forget the free Nintendo Switch Sports Resort Gym Bag. The total savings from picking up this bundle are around £75.

Today's best Nintendo Switch 2 bundles

Switch 2 Mario Kart World Bundle: £459.99
As far as Switch 2 bundles go, this is one of the best value options I've ever seen. You get the console, plus the excellent Mario Kart World, a 256GB microSD card to expand the storage, and a Nintendo Switch 2 camera to use the console's GameChat features. Altogether, the saving is about £95 compared to buying everything at full price, and it's even more of a steal when you consider that the console by itself retails for £419.99.View Deal

Switch 2 Sports Resort Bundle: £449.99
An equally tempting alternative to the Switch 2 bundle above is this version that swaps Mario Kart World for a copy of Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. Given that this compilation of sports titles that make full use of the console's motion controls retails for less than the racer, it's a slightly cheaper bundle. You still get a 256GB microSD card and a Nintendo Switch 2 camera, as well.View Deal

As for the actual value of the extras in both bundles, each contains one of the best Nintendo Switch 2 games to start your collection.

Mario Kart World is a fantastic new entry in the party racer series, which expands it with more freedom and open-world elements. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, meanwhile, is another fun compilation of games that make use of the console's motion controls to recreate tennis, volleyball, bowling, golf, and more.

The microSD card is a really nice inclusion as well. Even though the Switch 2 comes with a respectable 256GB of storage built in, having another 256GB on top is very handy as game sizes are continuously increasing, and this means you can have a relatively large library of titles installed at once.

Lastly, there's the Switch 2 Camera, which is probably the least valuable item of the bunch. If you do expect to do a lot of online multiplayer with friends and family, though, this will let you make the most of Game Chat features that can put your face and voice in certain games as you play, including Mario Kart World.

• Openreach warns landline phones will stop working on January 31, 2027
• Legacy PTSN system is going digital, so users should switch now
• Openreach remind businesses and consumers alike to check their connections

Openreach has issued a reminder warning that the UK's legacy landline phone network will be switched off in less than 100 days.

BT's infrastructure arm, responsible for deploying, maintaining and upgrading most of the country's networks, has reminded users the copper-based Public Switched Telephone Network (PTSN) network will be retired on January 31, 2027.

There will be no extension to this cut-off, meaning users, both business and consumer alike, will need to ensure their systems are ready for the change.

Time to switch

The news of the "big switch off", as Openreach's advice hub calls it, should not be a surprise, as plans were first announced to shut down the PSTN and ISDN networks by the end of 2025 back in 2017 - with the deadline later extended to 2027.

It notes that the aging landline network is harder to maintain and more vulnerable to faults, whilst also being unable to keep up with the demands posed by modern usage.

Openreach says it has already supported the migration of around 15 million lines off the old copper-based network, and although most of our homes and offices will have already switched to digital-based Internet Protocol (IP) fiber networks, there are a wide range of systems which still rely on PSTN connectivity.

Among the items needing upgrading point-of-sale terminals in shops, fire and security alarms, and personal care alarms for elderly and vulnerable people.

“Businesses and organisations that delay action are making things harder for themselves, noted James Lilley, Director of All-IP at Openreach.

"The straightforward migrations have largely been completed. What's left are the complex connections that underpin critical operations, requiring careful planning, supplier coordination, and thorough testing. We are urging businesses to act now, audit their remaining analogue services, and work with their communications provider on a migration plan today.”

Openreach's website notes the move to digital phone lines will help provide users with a more reliable service, better-quality calls and smarter blocking of unwanted calls.

It tells users to not wait until the deadline, and to get in contact with your service provider as soon as possible to get the move going.

Anyone who has not switched by the January 2027 deadline may see limited service after that time, and may be moved to the Emergency Voice and Access Continuity (EVAc) service, a temporary emergency voice-only service which keeps basic voice calls working for a limited time.

An FAQ includes the question "I don't want broadband. Can I have a phone line only?" but includes only a wishy-washy response - "If you have a phone line but don’t have broadband, your service provider will help you find the most suitable digital option for your needs."

Collaboration platforms have become central to working life, with Microsoft Teams alone serving more than 320 million monthly active users worldwide. Everywhere you look, they are now part of workplace culture and have been a driving force for change in the use of voice services.

Part of their ongoing appeal is that they are extremely simple to deploy and their familiarity flattens the learning curve for many users almost entirely. For IT teams, one of the key benefits is that they sit within an established supplier environment and, as a result, can help make procurement more straightforward.

Sounds great, but communication infrastructure must also be able to adapt over time - for example, when a business expands or changes how it serves customers. Depending on the platform, any functional limitations may only become clear when a business needs to connect communications with other systems or adapt services for new teams and locations.

The point is that inflexibility can create complications that significantly increase the initial cost of a collaboration solution; something that businesses can easily overlook.

The hidden cost of inflexibility

But what do we mean by complications? Well, any given collaboration platform may work perfectly well for everyday internal calling, yet they all have the potential to become restrictive when communications need to support more specialized processes.

To break this down, everyday internal calls have relatively simple requirements because employees already know who to contact and how to reach them. However, in use cases such as customer-facing communications, employees may require calls to be directed based on factors such as location or the nature of the inquiry.

They may also need access to relevant customer information while the conversation is taking place, whether it is held in a CRM platform or another business application, including a bespoke system where technology integration is more challenging.

This is where the level and quality of the integration becomes extremely important, as any limitations may force employees to switch between applications or search manually for information that should be readily available.

Get this wrong, and users may require a customer to repeat information, which can extend the interaction and cause frustration. Some businesses may also need more detailed insight into call activity when they are trying to identify problems or improve customer service. For many, this is a central objective when building these systems and processes.

Adding workarounds, such as asking staff to look up customer records manually or using a separate connector to pass data between systems, is one option. However, these can make it harder for IT teams to manage the service consistently as requirements change.

Why AI changes the equation (again)

The issues are becoming even more consequential as businesses look to use AI to handle a greater share of customer communications, because these systems need access to the right information to respond usefully.

For an assistant to deal with an inquiry properly, it needs to draw on the same customer information that a human employee would use. But when an inquiry cannot be resolved automatically, the conversation needs to reach the appropriate person without losing its context.

This is where any disconnect between the communications environment and core business systems can really limit what an AI assistant can do well. AI that cannot access the right information can create an additional layer of friction for customers and employees.

Ideally, these compromises should be avoided entirely. A business should be able to retain the collaboration tools employees already know while adding communication and integration capabilities where needed.

In fact, seamless connectivity and interaction between the user, the AI tools being used, and the relevant customer and operational data should be a core objective rather than a nice-to-have. This means that the technology should be able to accommodate changing requirements without creating a dependence on manual workarounds, so organizations have full control over the pace at which they adopt new technologies and processes.

Businesses planning to expand their use of AI, which is likely to include a great many of them, should consider whether their current communications infrastructure can support those connections. Granted, it is usually possible to retrofit systems to bridge functionality and service gaps, but if the objective is to use AI effectively across a growing number of customer interactions, flexibility needs to be built into the foundation from the outset.

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In the UK, fraud losses reached £1.3billion, showcasing how fraud operates at a growing scale. One of the factors driving this growth is the increasing use of technologies, such as AI, which are becoming dangerous and effective weapons in the hands of a new generation of criminals

As they continue to evolve, criminal networks are becoming faster and more sophisticated in their operations, and financial institutions face the challenge of adapting to a new era of cybersecurity and fraud prevention powered by the same force threatening the system and customers’ trust.

AI is reinventing cybercrime

Fraudsters are already using advanced technologies including generative AI to industrialize social engineering. As the marginal cost of a sophisticated attack approaches zero, criminal networks are undergoing a measurable structural shift in how they operate. Skills that previously lived inside a small number of highly specialized criminal groups are now commoditized.

Generative AI and synthetic identity creation can now produce composite identities that pass Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, build believable credit histories and operate undetected for months before the fraud is executed. Deepfake-enabled authorization fraud produces voices and videos convincing enough to trick humans into authorizing transactions or transferring access credentials.

These examples all reveal a common pattern: they attack the trust layer, the moment where a system or a human decides something is legitimate. Even with incredibly sophisticated models, the tactics will target the system and subsequent operations. AI can now manufacture trust at a speed and quality that was simply not possible before.

Why traditional security is falling behind

Such technologies now have the upper-hand as they are largely defeating the customer, not the bank's systems. Fraudsters are using AI to manipulate people into authorizing transactions themselves with more convincing scam calls, more realistic impersonation, more personalized social engineering that erodes the skepticism that used to protect people. The fraud arrives at the bank's systems looking entirely legitimate, because in a technical sense it is.

That is where the battle is being fought today. As banks continue to invest in AI-driven detection and the customer manipulation route becomes harder to exploit at scale, the incentive to attack the banks' systems directly increases.

We are in a transitional phase, where technology is helping fraudsters to defeat people, this could evolve toward AI directly probing and attacking the institutions themselves. The financial sector should be preparing for that second phase now.

Against an adversary that probes, adapts and iterates continuously, the current static nature of traditional security controls are not sufficient. In financial fraud and cybersecurity, AI-driven attacks are not just evading controls, they are mapping them. They behave almost as if they understand the shape of the detection system and are deliberately staying outside its boundaries.

A symbiotic relationship between workforce and technology

In banks and financial institutions, fraud prevention teams are increasingly struggling to keep up with the constant technological evolution of the threats, mostly because they have been trained to think in terms of incidents: if something happens, you detect it, you respond, you close the case.

The ones making the most progress are those treating detection as a research function rather than an operational one. They are looking at shifts in behaviors that might suggest something is being tested against us. This different analytical posture ultimately aids in prevention over detection.

The professionals who will matter most in five years are the ones who can reason about systems rather than just operate them. There is a need to move from expertise in specific tools to expertise in the underlying principles that make tools work. Principles, such as statistical reasoning, adversarial thinking, systems design, feedback loop analysis, compound over time and remain relevant regardless of what the technology stack looks like in years to come.

Not all organizations are equipped to operate this way, and while hiring to fill this gap might be the obvious solution, the reality is that, thanks to advancements and widespread adoption, today we have cutting-edge AI tools that can be easily integrated within existing infrastructure and operations.

The way forward is to invest in the work of external providers that make these tools accessible and easy to deploy, combining statistical analysis, reasoning and full explainability.

Deploying new technologies without fueling risks

You don’t need to be technically sophisticated to deploy a technically sophisticated attack, and this democratization of capability is what makes the next wave genuinely different. The questions practitioners are working through now are not whether new technologies work, but how to leverage the next generation of capabilities to stay ahead of increasingly automated attacks.

The most important principle is to treat your systems as attack surfaces from day one rather than as an afterthought once they are in production. Every model you deploy has assumptions baked into it, and adversarial actors will probe those assumptions systematically. If you have not done that probing yourself first, you are outsourcing your red team function to people with very different intentions.

To be effective, AI-driven defenses must work in milliseconds - fast enough to spot risk without disrupting the customer experience. Every transaction is assessed in real time, analyzing hundreds of signals and comparing them against historical patterns to identify any signs of anomalous activity.

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Liquid Web has been operating since 1997. It focuses on infrastructure for businesses, agencies, developers, and high-traffic sites. Its range centers on cloud VPS, managed VPS, dedicated servers, managed WordPress, and WooCommerce rather than the cheap shared-hosting bundles sold by mainstream hosts. That specialization gives it more depth than most providers, but also makes plan selection and pricing more complicated.

• Interested in Liquid Web? Check out the website here

Liquid Web: Plans and pricing

Liquid Web offers a variety of premium hosting solutions though VPS is its specialty (Image credit: Liquid Web // Future)

The entry Cloud VPS configuration quoted by Liquid Web's sales team uses one CPU core, 2GB of RAM, 60GB of SSD storage, and 2TB of bandwidth for $11 a month.

It is self-managed, with no control panel or backups, and the Amsterdam location costs the same as the US option. That is a reasonable raw-server price, but customers are responsible for the operating system, security, updates, and applications.

Pricing requires care. Liquid Web's public VPS page was still advertising a $5 1GB plan when I checked, but a sales agent said that plan was no longer available and directed me to the current $11 configuration.

A separate promotion reduced a 4GB, two-vCPU server from $17 to $8.50 for its first two months. The discounts are clearly labeled once found, but the mismatch between the landing page and the live sales information is unnecessarily confusing.

The low base price changes dramatically when Liquid Web's signature services are added. Sales confirmed that the 2GB server with full management and cPanel Admin Cloud 5 costs $86 a month in total. The least expensive Acronis option adds another $22 for 100GB, bringing that setup to $108 a month. Its default retention is seven daily, four weekly, and one monthly backup, and the schedule can be adjusted. Liquid Web's public managed VPS range starts at $72 a month for two vCPUs, 4GB of RAM, 80GB of SSD storage, and 3TB of bandwidth, before any separately priced options.

Managed WordPress is much cheaper. Spark Launch starts at $5 a month when billed annually and supports one site, 15GB of storage, and 2TB of bandwidth, with unlimited visits, daily backups retained for seven days, staging, Cloudflare Enterprise, DDoS protection, and a web application firewall. This is the more approachable choice for one WordPress site; VPS makes sense when the workload or need for server-level control justifies the extra complexity.

There is no free Cloud VPS trial, and sales confirmed that monthly Cloud VPS purchases are generally non-refundable. That is a material disadvantage when the useful managed configurations cost far more than their headline server price. Customers should finalize the location, management tier, panel, and backup requirements before ordering.

Liquid Web: Ease of use

Liquid Web's configurator provides unusually granular choices. Depending on the product, customers can select the server size, data center, operating system, self-managed, core managed, or fully managed support, and a control panel such as InterWorx, Plesk, or cPanel. Self-managed customers retain root access and handle administration themselves. Fully managed support adds operating system and control panel updates, security patches, monitoring, server-side troubleshooting, firewall configuration, and help with common software.

There is no demo account for exploring the customer portal before purchase. Even so, our hands-on VPS testing found the management interface clear and intuitive. Installing WordPress was straightforward, the AI site-building tool made it easy to create a starting point, and importing a prepared WordPress and WooCommerce site worked without the credential and database confusion encountered with InMotion Hosting.

Liquid Web also offers a dedicated migration team. On managed services, it can move website content, email, databases, and control panel accounts while coordinating the process to minimize downtime. That hands-on assistance is one reason to pay for management, particularly for agencies or businesses moving a revenue-generating site. Domain registration is not bundled with the server, and Liquid Web is not the natural choice for someone who wants a domain, email, site builder, and hosting in one inexpensive package.

Liquid Web: Speed and experience

We used GTmetrix to test the uptime and response time of Liquid Web's main site (Image credit: GTmetrix)

Performance is where Liquid Web makes its strongest case. In our WordPress server benchmark, which measures CPU, memory, file operations, database performance, and network speed, Liquid Web produced an overall server score of 8.1 compared with InMotion Hosting's 6.1.

It scored 10 for small-file I/O, 9.66 for local file copying and access, 9.72 for simple database queries, 9.64 for complex database queries, and 9.53 in the network download test. Those are excellent results for a business-focused VPS and support its position as our best VPS host overall.

Our broader testing has been similarly positive. Liquid Web's main website earned an A and 100% performance score in GTmetrix, although its 6.8-second full load time showed why a single headline grade should not be read in isolation.

In a separate two-week UptimeRobot test of the same public site, we recorded no downtime and an average response time of around 107ms. These tests measure different aspects of performance, but both point to a fast and dependable platform.

Liquid Web backs its infrastructure with a 100% network uptime SLA. The wording matters: it guarantees that major routing devices in its network remain reachable from the global internet, rather than promising that every application will run without interruption. Even with that distinction, the guarantee is stronger than the 99.9% or 99.99% figures common among general-purpose hosts.

Liquid Web: Support

(Image credit: Liquid Web // Future)

Support is available 24/7/365, with the scope depending on the chosen management tier. Self-managed customers receive network and hardware support, while core managed and fully managed plans progressively add operating system maintenance, monitoring, troubleshooting, panel support, and software assistance. The documentation is extensive, and customers can use live chat or open a support case from the portal.

My pre-sales check produced a human acknowledgment in 20 seconds, comfortably inside Liquid Web's advertised 59-second initial response target. The first substantive answer arrived after about four minutes. The agent clearly confirmed that the old $5 plan was unavailable, that Amsterdam carried no location surcharge, and that the $11 server included neither management, a control panel, nor backups.

After correcting a price typo, the agent confirmed the $86 total for the 2GB VPS with full management and cPanel, the $22 Acronis option, its retention schedule, and the lack of a standard refund. The answers were detailed rather than evasive, and the agent supplied configuration and policy links.

Sales also confirmed that Liquid Web still promotes a 59-second response target, although its current SLA describes initial chat and help-desk response times as goals rather than guarantees. I liked the directness of the exchange, even if the four-minute wait for a full answer shows that a fast initial response is not the same as an immediate resolution.

Liquid Web: The competition

ScalaHosting is the more approachable managed VPS alternative. Its SPanel ecosystem bundles many hosting-management tasks into a lower-cost package and suits users who want to avoid cPanel licensing fees.

In our direct WordPress benchmark comparison, ScalaHosting scored 8.3 against Liquid Web's 8.1, so performance was closely matched rather than a clear Liquid Web victory. Liquid Web offers deeper infrastructure choices and a broader high-end range, but the price difference becomes substantial once equivalent management, panel, and backup options are selected.

Cloudways takes a different approach by managing servers from infrastructure providers such as DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud. It is easier to enter at a moderate monthly cost and is especially attractive for WordPress, but it does not offer cPanel and does not provide the same conventional managed-server relationship. Liquid Web is the stronger fit when infrastructure control, migration help, and an experienced server support team matter more than the lowest monthly bill.

Liquid Web: Final verdict

Liquid Web remains one of the best choices for businesses that need a serious VPS rather than a cheap hosting account. Its benchmark results are excellent, its server configurations are flexible, and its support team gives specific, technically useful answers. Those strengths justify its position as our best VPS host overall for demanding sites, agencies, and customers who value managed infrastructure.

It is not the best-value option for everyone. The $11 entry server is a bare self-managed configuration, the website still shows a discontinued $5 offer, Cloud VPS purchases are generally non-refundable, and a representative managed configuration can exceed $100 once cPanel and backups are included. Beginners with one modest WordPress site should consider the managed WordPress range or a conventional shared host instead.

Choose Liquid Web when performance, configuration freedom, migration assistance, and capable support are worth paying for. Choose ScalaHosting or Cloudways when easier entry pricing matters more. Liquid Web earns four stars because its premium experience is convincing, but its pricing needs to be read all the way through the configurator rather than judged by the headline figure.

The districts that will decide control of the House and Senate next year are spread across the country. Voting officials in those places may face scrutiny and pressure they've never experienced.

(Image credit: Scott Olson)

Some of the key storylines to watch will center around various voters groups that have soured on President Trump during his second turn out.

(Image credit: Spencer Platt)

Colleges are trying to transform an admissions process that has often been daunting, secretive and stressful into an experience that's open, easier — and downright friendly.

(Image credit: Oliver Parini)

Vance's delivery is different from the president's but his speeches contain plenty of MAGA DNA.

(Image credit: ALEX WROBLEWSKI)

Many people are swapping out their fluoride dental products for ones made with a mineral called hydroxyapatite. What do dentists say about it?

(Image credit: mihailomilovanovic)

• Virgin Media O2 currently employs around 16,000 workers
• However reports claim 25% could be set for redundancy
• Non-customer-facing roles will likely be heaviest hit

Sky News has reported that Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) plans to cut an unconfirmed number of jobs – understood to be in the thousands – amid ongoing cost reduction efforts and a bid to get a grip on company debt.

Though the number of workers said to be impacted is not yet known, the company currently employs around 16,000 workers, so 'thousands' would represent a significant chunk of its workforce.

VMO2 looks to be one of the latest companies in a long list to be flattening its hierarchy, with changes to management reportedly underway.

VMO2 job cuts look to be around the corner

Crucially, Sky News reports that non-customer-facing roles will likely be heaviest hit. The firm's customer services typically perform well, it seems, with Virgin Media reporting the fewest number of complaints compared with competitors (via Ofcom) on the broadband front. Though O2 sits somewhere toward the top on the mobile front, beating only Sky Mobile (which also uses the O2 network).

An unnamed insider believes as many as 4,000 jobs could be at risk, representing 25% of VMO2's entire workforce.

It's believed that the company could share precise numbers and details as part of its Q3 earning call on November 3. Overall company revenue dropped 7.9% last quarter.

But VMO2's biggest issue is likely debt. Last quarter, it reported a total net debt equivalent to 5.89x annualized adjusted EBITDA.

But VMO2 isn't the only telecoms giant adjusting its workforce in response to financial pressures – VodafoneThree also confirmed plans to cut 1,200 jobs in July 2026, though these were Europe-wide.

VMO2 declined to comment.

If you work in cybersecurity for long enough, you learn that we really love an analogy or a metaphor and come October you can barely move for talk of security nightmares, cyber monsters and threats lurking in the shadows.

I enjoy a good analogy as much as anyone, but there’s one Halloween comparison I don't hear very often. And, for data security at least, I think it might be the most useful one right now: the mask.

A mask doesn't make what's underneath disappear. It simply means you don't have to reveal its true identity to everyone who encounters it, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve with sensitive data.

Developers need data to test applications, analysts need it to find patterns, and AI tools and agents increasingly need access to enterprise information to do useful work. But needing to use this data isn't necessarily the same as needing to see every sensitive value it contains.

That's precisely where data masking comes in. By replacing sensitive information with realistic but unusable values, organizations can preserve the usefulness of data without unnecessarily exposing what's underneath.

With AI dramatically increasing where data can travel, who can find it and what can act upon it, that distinction is becoming much more important.

A disguise with a serious purpose

At its core, data masking replaces sensitive information with realistic but unusable values. The resulting dataset can retain characteristics necessary for development, testing, analytics and other business processes without unnecessarily exposing the sensitive information underneath. Think of it as a Halloween costume with a security purpose; the data can still show up to the party without revealing its true identity.

That distinction matters because protecting data shouldn't simply mean preventing people from using it. Modern businesses depend upon being able to analyze, test against and increasingly train or ground AI systems in enterprise information. Instead, the question should be: does this person, application or AI system actually need the original sensitive value to perform this task?

A developer testing an application may need representative customer data, for example, but not necessarily genuine customer identities. An analytics workload may need to preserve relationships and patterns without revealing every account number or personal identifier.

If the real value isn't required, exposing it creates risk without creating corresponding business value.

Masking removes that unnecessary exposure. Depending on the use case, organizations can also use techniques including tokenization and encryption. The important principle is to match protection to how the information needs to be used rather than defaulting to exposing raw sensitive data.

You can't mask what you can't find

There is an obvious complication: before deciding what should wear a mask, businesses need to know where their sensitive information is.

That remains surprisingly difficult.

The 2026 Thales Data Threat Report found only 34% of surveyed organizations had complete knowledge of where their data was stored. Only 39% said they could classify all of it. Meanwhile, the average organization reported using seven different tools for data protection and monitoring.

Cloud infrastructure compounds the problem. Information can be copied into data lakes, SaaS platforms, development environments and backups. Unstructured documents can contain sensitive information nobody realized was there. Applications created years after the data was collected can suddenly gain access to it.

AI makes that visibility problem considerably more consequential because finding information is precisely what these systems are becoming very good at.

This is where data security posture management (DSPM) becomes important. Rather than treating data security purely as a question of defending infrastructure, DSPM starts with the data itself: discovering and classifying sensitive information and understanding where it resides, who or what can access it, how it is being used and whether its protection is appropriate.

Once an organization identifies unnecessarily exposed sensitive data, it can decide whether access should be removed, restricted or protected using controls such as masking, tokenization or encryption.

AI data: trick or treat?

This becomes particularly important as businesses progress from experimenting with generative AI towards embedding AI into everyday operations.

AI applications need data. Agents may need considerably more of it because they are designed not simply to generate content but to retrieve information, make decisions and potentially take actions across different systems.

The security implications are already becoming visible. The same research found 61% of organizations reported their AI applications were being targeted by attackers, with sensitive data the leading target. Rapid change within the AI ecosystem was also the most commonly cited AI security risk.

The important question, however, isn't simply whether AI can be secured. Organizations also need to ask a more fundamental question:

What data are we allowing AI to see in the first place?

Giving an AI application access to a database shouldn't automatically mean giving it access to every raw sensitive value contained within it. The same least-privilege principle used for human identities can be applied to data: expose what is necessary for the task and protect what isn't.

That could mean masking personal information before it reaches development and testing environments. It could mean tokenizing particularly sensitive values used by an application. It could mean encrypting information and tightly controlling which identities can decrypt it. And in some circumstances, it should mean preventing an AI system from accessing a dataset altogether.

Don't make AI security harder than it needs to be

There is a tendency to treat AI security as an entirely new discipline requiring entirely new answers.

Some risks certainly are new. But one of the most useful things organizations can do is apply established data-security principles to this new environment.

Know where sensitive data resides. Understand its context. Minimize unnecessary access. Protect the underlying value according to how it needs to be used. And continually reassess those decisions as applications and AI systems change.

AI may dramatically increase how much value organizations can extract from their data. It doesn't follow that every system extracting that value needs to see everything underneath.

Halloween only comes around once a year. For sensitive data, however, having the option to wear a convincing mask year-round is becoming a non-negotiable.

We've reviewed and ranked the best data removal services.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

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Walk into the network operations center of any major enterprise and you will see an array of monitoring capability. Massive dashboards track API response times to the millisecond and map digital customer journeys from an ad click on a smartphone all the way to a virtual shopping basket. On paper, enterprise IT has achieved total operational awareness.

Step onto the high street at twelve-thirty on a Friday afternoon, however, and that illusion dissolves. A payment terminal freezes at a busy cafe counter. The line extends out the door. The cashier tries rebooting the hardware while office workers check their watches.

Within minutes, shoppers begin walking out empty-handed, heading straight for the competitor across the street. Back at corporate headquarters, central monitoring dashboards remain entirely green. As far as IT knows, systems are operating normally.

This disconnect represents one of the most significant operational blind spots in physical commerce today. In the UK alone, checkout failures put an estimated £1.7 billion in annual sales at risk. When transactions stall during peak trading windows, that revenue is cannot be recovered.

The failure is rarely a collapse of the central cloud. Often, it is a telemetry blackout occurring at the critical physical touchpoint where money actually changes hands.

Why payment security creates blind spots

To understand how physical commerce ended up in the dark, one must look at the intersection of security compliance and legacy monitoring tools. For years, the gold standard of enterprise visibility has been Application Performance Monitoring. These platforms thrive in open cloud environments where software agents can trace code execution and inspect payloads across distributed microservices.

Physical payment infrastructure operates under radically different constraints. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard mandates strict network isolation to protect cardholder information. Point-of-sale software, payment applications and hardware PIN pads are deliberately locked inside hardened, encrypted subnets.

While non-negotiable for security, this architecture creates an operational dead zone. The moment a transaction leaves the standard corporate network and crosses the compliance boundary, visibility ceases. As the signal travels through local hardware, store routers, third-party gateways and acquiring banks, standard IT tools cannot follow.

Central teams only discover an outage when store managers log manual helpdesk tickets or when batch reconciliation reports reach the operations team hours later.

The cost of the seven-minute window

IT support teams measure incident resolution in hours, but in-store shoppers measure patience in seconds. Research tracking consumer behavior during in-store disruptions shows that shopper patience has a hard limit of approximately seven minutes. Once a payment delay crosses that mark, the customer abandons the purchase entirely.

Contrast this narrow seven-minute window with the standard lifecycle of an IT incident. The average payment disruption takes over sixty minutes to diagnose and resolve. By the time an on-duty manager contacts support, the ticket escalates to an engineering queue and analysts begin combing through disparate vendor portals to locate the failure, the high-traffic sales surge has passed.

In an era where cash use is in significant decline and frictionless contactless payments are expected, relying on post-incident reviews results in lost revenue.

Unlocking real-time payment telemetry

Solving this problem requires an architectural evolution from delayed, post-mortem log scraping to real-time telemetry streaming. The key insight lies in understanding that monitoring transaction health does not require exposing sensitive cardholder data. Enterprise architectures must cleanly decouple regulated financial data from operational metadata.

While the payload containing card numbers remains locked inside the compliance envelope, operational metadata, such as gateway response codes, handshake transit times, peripheral hardware status, and localized network latency, can be safely extracted and streamed in real time.

By transforming every swipe, tap and dip into an operational data feed, engineering teams gain an end-to-end view of the transaction pipeline. Site reliability engineers can finally monitor the health of physical checkout counters with the same fidelity they apply to their cloud applications.

Using AI for automated fixes

Streaming telemetry provides the necessary visibility, but human analysis alone cannot keep pace with the volume of modern commerce. During a peak holiday rush, an enterprise payment stack might process tens of thousands of transactions every minute across hundreds of distributed venues.

A subtle degradation, such as an obscure firmware glitch that causes contactless taps to time out on ten percent of devices, is impossible for a human operator to catch in real time.

This is where AI and edge observability can make a decisive difference. Rather than depending on static alerts that trigger after a catastrophic failure, machine learning models analyze continuous velocity curves, baseline latency distributions, and transaction state patterns.

When a performance degradation begins, AI tools can rapidly isolate the root cause, instantly identifying whether a delay stems from an in-store network drop, a faulty card reader or a struggling banking gateway.

More importantly, this intelligence allows for true closed-loop remediation. Integrated with intelligent payment orchestration platforms, the system can automatically reroute transaction traffic around a failing processor to an alternative rail without the customer noticing a delay. If a store loses connectivity entirely, edge architecture can switch terminals into secure, encrypted store-and-forward modes without interruption.

The high street cannot afford operational dead zones. By combining privacy-safe telemetry with AI-driven intelligence, technology leaders can finally bridge the gap between back-end infrastructure and front-of-house revenue, ensuring that when the rush hits, the checkout keeps moving.

We've featured the best ecommerce platform.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit