TopNewsOn

Results for “thrown anyone”

Freezer meltdowns and airline hoaxes are a taste of things to come. Hoping for the best is no longer an option | Elisabeth Braw

Acts of greyzone aggression aim to spread panic. Europe has to show the saboteurs that we are resilient It was as though a ghostly hand had switched the settings on supermarket freezers across Europe from “freeze” to “defrost”. From Finland to Ireland, they suddenly began heating up , many reaching 50C and food worth millions of euros had to be thrown away. But no actual hand was needed to cause the meltdown. This was a cyber-attack, or rather a chain of attacks. Like pretty much everything else in 2026, supermarket freezers are digitally enabled. That makes them smarter and more efficient, but like everything else that is connected to the internet, it also makes them more vulnerable. Russian hacktivists claimed they were behind some of the supermarket sabotage, but no one knows for sure. It could also be Iran, Iranian proxies, North Korea – or unaffiliated bedroom hackers. When Transport for London suffered a devastating hack two years ago, the culprits turned out to be two British teenagers . Governments regularly warn retailers and other companies about cyber-attacks and even provide cyber-defence training to businesses . The lessons of costly ransomware and cyber-attacks also mean many big organisations and retailers have become much better at keeping their payments and logistics systems safe. Elisabeth Braw is a Swedish security expert and the author of The Undersea War : The International Battle for Supremacy at the Bottom of the World Continue reading...

The Guardian · Nov 7
Just about anyone can rent access to White House IP addresses

Someone at the White House appears to be running software that could enable outsiders to rent access on the presidential network for just "a few dollars," as reported by Krebs on Security and The Register. That's according to findings from the security firms Layer3 Intel and Synthient, which discovered residential proxy activity on the White […]

The Verge · Nov 6
The 36 best Christmas gifts in the UK for every kind of teenager – chosen by teens

From Polaroid cameras to skincare, loungewear to gaming accessories, here are the presents teenage boys and girls told us they rate for 2026 • Homemade Christmas gifts anyone can make Because there is no doubt your teen thinks they know better than you, we took them at their word and asked what they think makes the perfect gift for Christmas (or other religious festival they celebrate). To ensure the selection was truly tried and tested, we asked them only about presents they have already received, love and use constantly. We also made sure to ask a broad range of teens – from book lovers to tech fiends and plenty in between – to try to represent the myriad tastes of this age group. Continue reading...

The Guardian · Nov 6
Winner of the Prix Goncourt literary prize admits to using AI

Philippe Jaenada told French radio that he used ChatGPT to ‘play with the reader’, after the prize removed a different book from its longlist over allegations of AI use The winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize has admitted using artificial intelligence while writing his novel, barely a day after collecting an award whose jury had thrown out another book over suspected AI use. Philippe Jaenada, who won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), told France Inter radio on Wednesday that he had turned to AI “three times” while writing it. Continue reading...

The Guardian · Nov 5
Apple will check shared iCloud links for ‘harmful content’

Apple will start checking iCloud items that are accessible to anyone who has the link for "harmful content" starting with iOS 27.3 and other 27.3 updates, the company says. "When you share an item that can be accessed by Anyone with the Link in version 27.3 or later of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, that […]

The Verge · Nov 4
Why the weirdest game of 2026 is also one of my favourites

Titanium Court is a bizarre world of 8-bit fairies, Shakespeare and surprise songs – its magic lies in never knowing what on earth is going on • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Earlier this year, I was stuck in hospital for several days, fuzzy on pain medication and bored out of my mind, with nothing but a Steam Deck for company. In the middle of one of those long nights, unable to sleep, I played a game called Titanium Court . It’s a strange creation that looks like it was made for the ZX Spectrum and reads like a postmodern Shakespeare adaptation – a compelling mix of strategy game and match-3 where you rearrange battlefields by matching tiles, before sending tiny lo-fi fairy armies to their deaths. At the end of this late-night run, I met a boss I’d defeated before – a comically hungry dragon – and the game asked if I would like to skip the boss fight and enjoy a musical performance instead. A game has never asked me this before. Of course, I accepted. And then, instead of the familiar tiled battlefield, I was looking at a pixellated singer-songwriter, who launched into an extremely long preamble about the mating habits of the Pacific salmon before saying, “This is a song for anyone else who ever got so horny they could die,” and launching into a soulful acoustic guitar number accompanied by crude images of leaping fish. I began to wonder if my meds were making me hallucinate. Continue reading...

The Guardian · Nov 4
Xbox’s smallest-ever controller is surprisingly comfortable

Even though I knew Microsoft's new Xbox Nano controller was tiny, I still gasped when I unboxed it a few days ago. The compact controller is small enough to slip into a pocket unnoticed, and it has been designed specifically for younger people, or for anyone with smaller hands. I'm not young, but I do […]

The Verge · Nov 3
Night Plane review – join the jumbo jet to hell in this indie horror head trip

Liquid Static Studio; PC You take on the role of flight attendant in this clever and absorbing retro-style game that veers from daft horror spoof to genuinely disturbing There was always something creepy about the job-simulator genre. All those mindless automatons queueing up to use your bus, bar or bed store, or whatever workplace you are trapped in for the duration of the game. The endless repetitive tasks. The emptiness of the world beyond your corporate existence. Together, these elements scream existential terror … which is perhaps why we are now seeing a new indie sub-genre of job sim horror games, including Home Safety Hotline, Dredge and more recently, Grease Trap ’99, a Lovecraftian mystery set in a Scottish chip shop. Now, we have Night Plane, in which you take on the role of a flight attendant on a jumbo jet to hell. It all starts kind of normally. You turn up for the first day of your new job, meet your colleagues, then take your spot at the departure gate, checking in customers and being careful to root out anyone with invalid tickets. Once on the plane, you roll your trolley down the aisle, serving booze and inedible meals, and occasionally dealing with passenger complaints. Then the plane crashes and, frankly, it all goes downhill from there. Continue reading...

The Guardian · Oct 29
Wikipedia often gets taken for granted – but its history is fascinating, and its future is fragile

Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was “for the factcheckers”, though there aren’t any – not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions – and even looks – much the same as it did 20 years ago. Continue reading...

The Guardian · Oct 18