UK law enforcement is done waiting for tech companies to sort themselves out. The National Crime Agency (NCA) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) have jointly called for children under 16 to be blocked from any social media, gaming apps, or AI that fails to disable what they describe as “high-risk” features.

This comes as the UK government is actively consulting on whether to introduce a full social media ban for under-16 users, per the BBC.

UK police want these six features to be banned from kids’ apps

Police want platforms to disable six features they say are enabling serious harm to children online. These include strangers being able to contact kids directly, private or encrypted messaging, algorithms pushing harmful content, nude image sharing, weak age checks, and anything that makes children easily discoverable by other users.

A lot of these are already covered under the UK’s Online Safety Act, which lets Ofcom, the UK’s official communications watchdog, investigate and fine platforms that break the rules. Police want to go further, though, pushing for legislation that blocks under-16s from any platform offering these features entirely, along with device-level nudity controls for all under-18s.

The online threat to children is getting worse

The stats are genuinely alarming. The NCA logged 92,000 reports of potential child sexual abuse activity online in 2025, and NCA director general Graeme Biggar says victims are getting younger, and that children are increasingly becoming offenders too.

NPCC chair Gavin Stephens put it bluntly, calling the internet a “wild west” where regulation just has not kept up. The government responded by backing Ofcom to go after platforms that do not comply, and said it is exploring everything from age limits and app curfews to outright bans.

These proposals do not go as far as Australia’s full under-16 social media ban, but the message from UK police is pretty clear. Time is up for tech companies dragging their feet on child safety.

Samsung Electronics and its unions failed to reach a deal on Wednesday, leaving a threatened 18-day walkout set to begin on Thursday.

Last-ditch South Korean government-mediated talks collapsed today (20 May), leaving an 18-day strike at the world’s biggest memory chipmaker set to begin on Thursday. As SiliconRepublic.com reported on 18 May, Samsung Electronics and its unions had entered what prime minister Kim Min-seok described as a final round of negotiations to avert a walkout by over 45,000 workers.

Unions had accepted the Korean National Labour Relations Commission’s mediation proposal, but Samsung rejected it, reported CNBC, with shares falling by 4.4pc on the news, according to Bloomberg.

Samsung Electronics said it “deeply regrets” the breakdown in mediation talks, in a statement published by Korean financial outlet Money Today, adding that it “will not give up on dialogue until the last moment”.

The dispute centres on Samsung’s performance-based bonus system. Unions are seeking bonuses equivalent to 15pc of operating profit, the removal of a cap limiting payouts to 50pc of base salary and formal multi-year contractual guarantees. Samsung has consistently refused to meet those demands in full.

The economic stakes remain huge. The prime minister had estimated direct strike losses at 1trn won ($664.7m), potentially rising to 100trn won if chip production disruptions force Samsung to scrap wafers already in production.

Officials have so far declined to invoke emergency arbitration powers – which could suspend the strike for up to 30 days – with the labour commissioner saying mediation could still restart, according to Reuters.

A court injunction requires safety and facility staffing to remain at normal levels during any industrial action, which is expected to limit the immediate production impact.

The company accounts for 22.8pc of South Korea’s exports and revenue equivalent to 12.5pc of GDP. With talks over and the strike set to begin on Thursday, attention turns to whether Samsung management will make a fresh approach to the unions tonight – or whether the government will finally reach for its emergency powers.

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from the turning-gold-into-lead dept

Elon Musk, business genius. When Elon Musk announced his plans to buy Twitter, some of his billionaire friends rushed to text him to say they’d throw whatever money they wanted into the deal. Larry Ellison casually offered “a billion… or whatever you recommend.” Marc Andreessen offered $250 million, no questions asked. This all came out in the lawsuit when Musk tried to back out of the deal:

Publicly, these billionaires insisted that Elon was a sure shot business genius who would easily make them much richer. Elon then sent around a presentation to other investors who would perhaps take a bit more convincing. The NY Times got its hands on Elon’s clearly pulled-out-of-his-ass projections. $26.4 billion in revenue by 2028! That included $12 billion from advertising, $10 billion from subscriptions and the rest from licensing.

Remember, at the time, Twitter’s ad revenue was decent: $4.51 billion in 2021 (its last full year as a public company) with another half a billion in licensing revenue. So Elon was suggesting he had the magic formula for massively increasing ad revenue and subscription revenue.

There was plenty of reporting over the last few years on how the opposite happened. Ad revenue absolutely tanked. It got so bad that the company started suing advertisers for not advertising on the newly renamed X (and threatening advertisers that choosing not to advertise would get them added to the lawsuit), pretending that it was some sort of antitrust violation. It took a court to point out that this was utter nonsense.

Anyway, given the private nature of X, we didn’t have any real official confirmation on some of the revenue numbers. But in the last year and a half, Elon has been merging his Xs. He merged X into xAI, then merged xAI into SpaceX. And now SpaceX has filed for a massive IPO, giving us an S1 with some financial information about how X is actually performing after all.

Of course, by merging all these companies, it gives Elon a bit of a chance to obfuscate the numbers. The user metrics, for example, show both users of X and xAI’s grok (which are not all the same). Also, somewhat ironically given Elon’s pretextual whining about how there were too many bots on Twitter, the S1 admits that a lot of the activity on X these days is almost certainly bots and they apparently have no way to break out how many humans still use the service:

“supported accounts” refers to, when used in the context of our X platform and Grok, a human, bot or similar account that logged into the X platform or Grok. The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active.

Gosh. I thought you were taking over the site to get rid of all the bots and spam.

Anyhoo, now that we have some numbers, let’s compare them to what Elon sold his investors.

Remember, the plan was $26.4 billion by 2028. We’re more than halfway there. How’s it going? Well… when he combines xAI (grok) revenue with X revenue (so not even just breaking out X’s ad revenue)… we get… a total of $3.201 billion in 2025. So, just to put this in perspective… when he took over in 2022 he laid out a five year plan to take the company that had $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before he bought it up to $12 billion in five years. Three years in and… it’s now somewhere pretty far below $3 billion. And they’re proud of the fact it’s finally started to go up again:

Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025 increased by $581 million, or 22.2%, compared to the prior year ended December 31, 2024. This increase was primarily due to an increase in advertising revenue of $116 million as advertising spend increased from advertising partners on X and an increase in AI solutions and infrastructure revenue of $465 million.

So… from 2024 to 2025… they increased advertising revenue on X… by… $116 million, after knocking it down by somewhere in the range of $2 billion? BUSINESS GENIUS.

But, that’s okay. Part of the pitch was that he was going to get advertising to be less than 50% of Twitter’s revenue by 2028 because it was going to be replaced by a massive wave of subscription revenue. $10 billion by 2028! Musk predicted 69 million users of Twitter Blue (what became X Premium) by 2025 and 159 million in 2028. And then also another 104 million subscribers to a mysterious “X” subscription by 2028, which was not explained in the pitch. Even though this was before the rollout of ChatGPT, if we want to grant Elon credit to think he had already planned to launch an AI subscription service called “X” by then… how are we doing towards those numbers?

As of March 31, 2026, we reached approximately 6.3 million active paid subscribers, which was comprised of approximately 4.4 million X Premium and Premium+ paid subscribers and approximately 1.9 million SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy and SuperGrok Lite paid subscribers.

Leaving aside the Grok subscribers… they have… 4.4 million X Premium subscribers. That seems a bit short of the 69 million paid subscribers (which was almost certainly chosen because Musk is, emotionally, a 12-year-old boy). Once you combine that with the Grok subscribers (most of those plans cost significantly more than X Premium) and you get a grand total of… $365 million. Given the breakdown of X vs. Grok subscribers and the different pricing, X subscribers likely account for less than two-thirds of that revenue — call it under $250 million. That seems juuuuust a bit short of $10 billion.

His initial pitch to investors also projected that by 2028 the payments business would be bringing in over a billion dollars. It’s now 2025 and while the S1 mentions payments, it’s very much a future thing:

We plan to further broaden the value proposition of X through offerings like Money, a product we launched in beta in November 2025, which aims to expand platform utility by enabling payments and other financial services.

In the pitch to investors, the plan was to have that generating revenue by 2023. A bit behind schedule, it seems.

Also, part of the pitch was that all the debt he’d taken on would be paid back through free cash flow. He even says that by 2025 (hmm… last year…) the company would grow to $3.2 billion. Uh, not so close. Again, that almost matches the revenue number, but the cash flow was… decidedly negative. The entire AI part of the business lost over $6 billion last year. I don’t think Elon’s paying off the debt with free cash flow any time soon.

Look, obviously, forward looking projections and investor pitches are fantasies. They always are. That’s kind of the point. And also, obviously, the consumer AI/LLM race which really became a consumer phenomenon started right after Musk closed the purchase, and shifted the landscape somewhat. Also, obviously, by merging X into xAI and then merging that combined company into SpaceX, the various investors are likely to make out just fine (even if it is stacking multiple houses of cards on top of each other).

But, given how there was a group of Silicon Valley VCs and Wall Street banker types who absolutely insisted that Elon had a Midas touch and would absolutely know how to turn Twitter into revenue gold, it seems worth checking in on just how badly those plans failed. Yes, he’s been able to paper that over with mergers between companies he owns, but the actual numbers don’t lie.

So where does this leave the investors who lined up to hand Elon a few billion dollars, no questions asked? Probably fine, actually. The SpaceX IPO will almost certainly value the combined entity at a number that makes early Twitter/X investors more than whole. That’s what merging a struggling social network into a so-so AI startup into a deeply in debt (but in strong demand) rocket company will get you — the underlying failure gets laundered by the valuation of everything else in the stack.

But the operational track record is what it is. Twitter was generating $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before Musk bought it. Three years into his five-year plan to reach $12 billion, the combined X/xAI advertising business is at somewhere under $3 billion — and that’s counting the separate AI business he launched after acquisition. The 69 million paid subscribers became 4.4 million. The $10 billion subscription business became $250 million. The payments business that was supposed to be generating revenue in 2023 just launched in beta in November 2025.

The “business genius” narrative was always doing a lot of work. Now we have the numbers. They don’t.

Filed Under: advertising, business, elon musk, ipo, projections

Companies: spacex, twitter, x, xai

Apple may already be testing one of the biggest iPhone redesigns in years, with a new leak suggesting the company has started evaluating a futuristic “all-screen” style display for its 2027 handset.

According to well-known Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station, Apple has reportedly entered production testing for a new iPhone featuring a quad-curved OLED display. This means the screen would curve around all four edges of the device rather than just the sides.

If accurate, this could become the most dramatic iPhone design shift since the introduction of the iPhone 12 range.

The rumoured device is currently being referred to online as the “iPhone 19 Pro,” though Apple’s actual branding remains unclear. Given that 2027 marks the iPhone’s 20th anniversary, there’s also a decent chance Apple skips ahead and calls it the iPhone 20 Pro instead.

Either way, the display sounds like the real focus here. Previous leaks have described it as a “Liquid Glass Display,” with ultra-thin bezels and subtle curves wrapping around the edges of the phone. Thankfully, reports suggest Apple is avoiding the aggressive waterfall-style screens seen on some older Android devices that often looked impressive but could be awkward to use in practice.

Instead, the curvature is said to be much more restrained and seamless.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time these rumours have surfaced. Reports from late 2025 claimed Samsung Display was already developing advanced OLED panels for Apple using something called COE, or Colour Filter on Encapsulation technology. More recent leaks also suggested that Samsung would become the primary supplier of curved display panels.

What makes this leak more believable is the source itself. Digital Chat Station has a fairly solid track record when it comes to Apple hardware leaks. The leaker previously revealed accurate details about the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro camera upgrades ahead of launch.

Of course, there’s still a long way to go before any of this becomes official. Apple is reportedly still focusing on the iPhone 18 lineup for this year, and if rumours are true, the first part of 2027. The company could also launch its foldable “iPhone Ultra” sometime in late 2026 if it resolves its production issues.

Still, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Apple sees 2027 as more than just another yearly iPhone refresh.

Nvidia smashed revenue records in its first quarter of fiscal 2027, with sales up 85pc year-on-year to $81.6bn.

The Santa Clara-based company saw its data centre division lead the charge, with revenue reaching $75.2bn, up 92pc from a year ago. Demand for Nvidia’s AI chips from hyperscale cloud providers and enterprise AI factories showed no signs of slowing, with quarterly revenue also up 20pc.

Gross margins held firm at around 75pc, and net income more than tripled to $58.3bn compared to the same period last year, reflecting Nvidia’s central role in the current AI infrastructure boom.

CEO Jensen Huang was typically ebullient, describing the moment as a major inflection point for the industry. “The buildout of AI factories – the largest infrastructure expansion in human history – is accelerating at extraordinary speed,” he said.

“Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value and scaling rapidly across companies and industries.”

Huang described “an extraordinary quarter” in closing out yesterday’s (21 May) earnings call, according to CNBC. “Demand has gone parabolic. The reason is simple: agentic AI has arrived,” he said.

“AI can now do productive and valuable work. Tokens are now profitable, so model makers are in a race to produce more. In the AI era, compute capacity is revenue and profits.”

Looking ahead, the company guided for Q2 revenues of $91bn, pointing to continued explosive growth, although it did note that it is not counting on any data centre revenue from China in that forecast.

Not everyone is without reservation. Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester, struck a note of caution: “At a roughly $5trn valuation, the question is no longer whether growth is strong, it’s whether growth can be sustained at this level.

“Nvidia’s continued success creates an extraordinary level of pressure that’s difficult to maintain, though the company has consistently risen to the challenge so far.”

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Most Mac users see Apple Preview as only an app to view images, PDFs, and other documents. That’s it. If that sounds like you, you are leaving a lot on the table, because Preview has quietly grown into one of the most capable apps on macOS, and it’s available for free.

I use the app daily to edit images, markup and sign PDFs, redact information, and so much more. So let me walk you through seven things you probably didn’t know Apple Preview could handle.

You can rearrange, combine, and pull out PDF pages

If you regularly work with PDFs, this one will save you a ton of time. Preview lets you easily rearrange pages in PDFs, combine multiple PDFs into one, and even extract specific pages from a PDF. 

To perform any of these actions, first you have to enable the thumbnail view. To do this, open a PDF file in Preview and go to View → Thumbnails or hit the keyboard shortcut ⌥⌘2 to reveal the sidebar. From here, you can click and drag pages to rearrange them in any order you like.

You can also drag a selected page out of the sidebar directly onto your desktop, and it will save those pages as a new PDF. No need for any extra software. 

You can also drag a PDF document or pages from other PDFs inside another PDF to merge them. 

Stop people from snooping on your PDFs

If you are sharing a sensitive PDF with someone and you don’t want anyone else to read it, you can lock it using Preview so only people with the correct password can open it. 

To do this, open your PDF, click the info button in the toolbar, find the security lock icon under Permissions, and click the Edit button. 

Now, check the box to require a password to open the document, set your password, and save the changes. You can even control what others can do without the password, like allowing them to print the file, but nothing else.

Another way to hide information is by redacting it. It permanently obscures the information so no one can read it. Note that once you save a redacted document, even you won’t be able to get the information back so ensure to create a copy of the original document before redacting it. 

To redact a document, open the Markup toolbar and click on the Redact tool. Now, you can highlight any text or just select an area to redact it. 

Read PDFs at night without burning your eyes

This one is a recent addition and an incredibly useful one. If you use your Mac in dark mode, Preview now has an option to match that for your PDFs. Go to View → Use Dark Appearance for PDF, and the blinding white background flips to a dark background that’s much easier on the eyes. Just keep in mind that this option only shows up when your Mac is already set to dark mode.

Remove image backgrounds without a third-party app

Preview also offers several image editing tools. Out of all the editing tools, my favorite is the one that lets me remove an image’s background. Yes, you don’t need Affinity or Photoshop to remove a background from an image. 

Preview can do it. Open an image, go to Tools → Remove Background, or hit the keyboard shortcut ⌘⇧K. As you can see in the image below, Preview has done a great job of removing the background and cutting out the subject. 

Open any image you just copied

Here is a little trick I use all the time. If you copy an image to your clipboard, you don’t need to paste it into a photo editing app to save it. Just open Preview and go to File → New from Clipboard or hit the keyboard shortcut ⌘N. Your copied image opens instantly, ready for you to edit, resize, or export.

Mark up screenshots and PDFs like a pro

The markup toolbar in Preview is genuinely great for quick edits. You can draw circles or rectangles to highlight something, add text, draw arrows, and even drop in your signature. 

While CleanShot X handles all my screenshot annotation needs, Preview is the app I use to markup my PDFs. And if you don’t deal with dozens of screenshots every day, Preview’s built-in functionality will be more than enough for you. 

Bonus tip: extract high-quality app icons

I don’t know who will need this feature, but I use it regularly, so I am sharing this as a bonus. Sometimes I need to use app icons to create images (like the one you see at the top of this article). 

If you have the app already installed on your Mac, you don’t need to hunt for the icon image on the web. Just go to the Application folder in Finder, select the app, and copy it. 

Now, launch Preview and use the “New from Clipboard” option, or use the ⌘N keyboard shortcut to open the app icon as an image in Preview. Now, use the ⌘S shortcut to save it to your desktop. 

Apple Preview is more than just a viewer

The point is that Apple Preview is genuinely powerful, and it’s sitting right there on your Mac, completely free. Whether you are managing PDFs, editing images, or trying to keep a late-night reading session from blinding you, Preview has you covered. Give it a proper chance, and I think it will earn a permanent spot in your workflow.

With all of the TVs available today, and all of the technical terms and jargon associated with television technology, it can be tough to figure out what’s important. Here’s a quick guide to help cut through the confusion.

Picture quality: Broadly speaking, the type of display technology helps dictate how good a TV’s picture quality is, but OLED is typically the best display technology, and this is followed by LCD (including QLED, and Mini LED). OLED tends to have the best picture quality because it doesn’t need a backlight and every pixel can be either on or off, leading to great black levels. In comparison, each LED in a backlight looks after multiple pixels at a time so it isn’t as precise — it’s not yet 1:1. Among midrange models, look for a feature including full-array local dimming, mini-LED and 120Hz refresh rate, which (unlike some other extras) do help improve the picture in my experience. Additionally, If a TV uses Quantum Dots it often leads to better color performance, whether it’s an OLED or an LCD.

Screen size: Bigger is better in my book. I recommend a size of at least 43 inches for a bedroom TV and at least 55 inches for a living room or main TV — and 65 inches or larger is best. More so than any “feature,” stepping up in TV screen size is the best use of your money. One of the most common post-TV-purchase complaints I’ve heard is from people who didn’t go big enough. And I rarely hear people complain that their TV is too large. It’s worth adding that while TVs can get really big indeed, 4K resolution is sufficient for even the biggest models, and CNET doesn’t recommend any 8K TVs as they represent a poor comparative value.

Price: TVs range in price from $100 to more than $2,000. Smaller screens are cheaper, well-known brands are more expensive and spending more money can also get you better image quality. Most entry-level TVs have a good enough picture for most people, but TVs last a long time, so it might be worth spending more to get a better picture. It’s also best to shop for a TV in the fall when prices are lower.

Sound quality: Every TV has some sort of built-in speaker, but in my twenty years of reviewing AV equipment the sound of modern TVs has been routinely terrible. While I do test the audio on each model, if you are serious about sound quality then buying a separate soundbar (from $100) or home theater system will instantly improve vital aspects such as speech and bass reproduction.

Smart TV: Among entry-level TVs the most important feature is what kind of smart TV system the TV uses, and while some are proprietary to each brand (Samsung and LG) some models do offer Roku and Google TV.

For more TV buying advice check out How to Buy a TV.

For the last two years, tech companies have aggressively pushed the idea that AI is ready to replace huge chunks of repetitive human work. Meanwhile, Starbucks just discovered that accurately identifying milk cartons inside a coffee shop is apparently still harder than Silicon Valley promised.

The company is officially scrapping its AI-powered inventory counting system across North America just nine months after deployment, according to a Reuters report. The tool, designed to automate stock counting and reduce in-store shortages, reportedly struggled with frequent miscounts and labeling errors, including confusing similar milk types or missing products entirely.

Starbucks’ AI inventory system: More headaches than solutions?

The automated counting system used cameras and LIDAR-equipped tablets to scan beverage inventory and ingredient stock across stores. It was part of CEO Brian Niccol’s larger “Back to Starbucks” turnaround strategy aimed at improving product availability and operational efficiency.

But despite Starbucks previously claiming that the system improved inventory visibility, employees reportedly continued to struggle with inaccurate counts and unreliable product recognition. Internal messages reviewed by Reuters even showed workers openly celebrating the tool’s removal. Starbucks says it will now return to manual inventory counting while focusing on more standardized replenishment systems and daily restocking improvements instead.

AI keeps failing at the boring stuff companies said it would solve first

The funny thing is that inventory counting is exactly the kind of structured, repetitive task AI companies constantly claim should be easy to automate. And yet, once these systems leave polished demos and enter messy real-world environments with lighting changes, similar packaging, and busy workers, things start falling apart surprisingly fast.

What makes this especially awkward is how aggressively corporations are currently chasing AI adoption. Companies everywhere are laying off workers, restructuring teams, and pouring billions into automation strategies while many AI systems still struggle with basic reliability in practical workflows. Starbucks accidentally becoming the latest example of “humans still needed” feels both hilarious and deeply predictable. Maybe the bigger lesson here is that replacing people turns out to be much harder than replacing PowerPoint presentations with AI-generated buzzwords.

Drupal is warning that hackers are attempting to exploit a “highly critical” SQL injection vulnerability announced earlier this week.

The content management system (CMS) project published a PSA on May 18, urging administrators to reserve time for core updates that addressed an issue that threat actors might start exploiting “within hours or days.”

The flaw is now tracked as CVE-2026-9082 and was discovered by Google/Mandiant researcher Michael Maturi. It affects Drupal’s database abstraction API. It allows specially crafted requests to trigger arbitrary SQL injection on sites using PostgreSQL.

SQL injection is a flaw in which attackers inject malicious SQL commands into database queries via user input fields or dialogs on websites, resulting in unauthorized access, modification, or deletion of database data.

The flaw is exploitable without authentication and could result in remote code execution, privilege escalation, and information disclosure.

In an update to the advisory on May 22, Drupal confirmed that exploitation attempts have been detected.

“The risk score has been updated to reflect that exploit attempts are now being detected in the wild,” reads the updated advisory.

Drupal rated the vulnerability as “highly critical,” assigning it an internal score of 23 out of 25. However, NIST has rated it as “medium severity” based on a CVSS v3 score of 6.5.

Impact and recommendations

CVE-2026-9082 impacts a broad range of Drupal versions, including:

• Drupal 8.9.x
• Drupal 10.4.x before 10.4.10
• Drupal 10.5.x before 10.5.10
• Drupal 10.6.x before 10.6.9
• Drupal 11.0.x / 11.1.x before 11.1.10
• Drupal 11.2.x before 11.2.12
• Drupal 11.3.x before 11.3.10

Website owners and administrators are recommended to upgrade immediately to the latest version available for their branch.

Those not using PostgreSQL are still advised to update, as the latest security updates also include fixes for upstream dependencies, including Symfony and Twig.

The advisory underlines that Drupal 8 and 9 are end-of-life (EoL), and that patches are provided on a “best-effort” basis; however, those branches still contain other known vulnerabilities, so continuing their use is inherently risky.

Automated pentesting tools deliver real value, but they were built to answer one question: can an attacker move through the network? They were not built to test whether your controls block threats, your detection rules fire, or your cloud configs hold.

This guide covers the 6 surfaces you actually need to validate.

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