The institution that counts France found itself counting victims this week. INSEE, the national statistics department, said a cyberattack had exposed personal data belonging to about 12,800 current and former staff, along with members of the civil-service corps attached to the agency. The breach was detected on 19 June. What was taken, according to INSEE, […]

A London court already found 26 of Samsung’s smartwatch faces infringed Swatch trademarks. Now the two sides are fighting over the bill. The fight between a Swiss watchmaker and the world’s largest phone maker has come down to a number, and the number is $170m. Swatch is asking the High Court in London to make […]

A self-publishing platform exists to say yes. Kobo’s, last year, spent a remarkable share of its time saying no. Rakuten Kobo rejected 45% of the titles submitted to Kobo Writing Life, its self-publishing service, in 2025, and chief executive Michael Tamblyn attributes more than 80% of those rejections to books he judges to be manifestly […]

Numbers in the trillions have a way of losing their edges, so it is worth holding this one still for a moment. Samsung is expected to announce plans to invest 1,000 trillion won, around $647.5bn, in South Korea over the next 10 years, according to local media reports that several outlets carried on 25 June. […]

Sam Altman told staff Washington wants GPT-5.6 released first to a short list of trusted partners, with access approved customer by customer. For years the debate over slowing down powerful AI models was a matter for company safety teams and outside critics. Now it has a government request attached. The Trump administration has asked OpenAI […]

The maker of the autonomous Chaparral is in advanced talks to go public through a blank-cheque merger valuing the combined company at about $1bn. The SPAC, declared dead more than once over the past few years, keeps finding new uses, and the latest is a cargo drone. Elroy Air, a California startup that wants to […]

The number arrives with the bluntness of a government tally. TikTok and YouTube have deactivated roughly 4.7 million accounts belonging to children under 16 in Indonesia, the country’s communications minister said on 25 June. The bulk of the cuts came from one platform: TikTok deactivated 4.1 million accounts, while YouTube removed 600,000, according to Communications […]

Every satellite company eventually looks down at the much larger market on the ground, and SpaceX appears ready to make the move. The company has told investors it plans to launch a Starlink mobile service for US consumers, the Financial Times reported on 26 June, citing people familiar with the matter. If it happens, it […]

The regulator says customers were moved to a pricier Copilot-bundled plan unless they actively opted out, with too little information to choose. The mechanics of a price rise can matter as much as the price itself, which is the question Italy’s competition authority has now decided to examine. On 26 June, the regulator said it […]

A law is only as strong as the door it actually closes, and Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s appears to have left a window open. On 26 June, six months after the world-first measure took effect, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was keen to make the ban as strong as possible, after […]