The Pegasus spyware PEGA committee set up by the European Parliament to investigate government surveillance abuses has itself become a surveillance target: Citizen Lab has confirmed that Greek journalist and former MEP Stelios Kouloglou had his phone compromised with Pegasus during 2022 and 2023, while serving on the committee probing its misuse. It is the first time a PEGA committee member has been publicly identified as a Pegasus victim, and the timing lands with some precision: the hacks coincide almost exactly with the committee’s most sensitive deliberative moments. What Citizen Lab’s forensic analysis found According to the University of Toronto’s…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
The Hopper FTC settlement, announced this week, will see the travel booking app pay $35 million in consumer redress after the US regulator accused it of burying fees, misrepresenting its paid features, and steering users into charges they never knowingly agreed to. Call it the price of friction design. What the Hopper FTC Settlement Actually Covers The FTC complaint against Hopper, filed on 2 July 2026 as Case 1:26-cv-13058, brings charges under Section 5(a) of the FTC Act and the agency’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees (the Fees Rule, 16 C.F.R. pt.). That rule specifically prohibits failing to disclose…
Bhavin Turakhia’s Neo platform is the latest $30 million argument that workplace software needs to be torn down and rebuilt for the AI era, not merely patched with a chatbot bolted on the side. Turakhia, 46, is bootstrapping the new venture entirely from his own pocket. The logic, he told TechCrunch, is that generative AI represents a shift big enough to justify starting from scratch rather than layering features onto legacy architecture. ‘If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,’ he said. It is the kind…
Together AI’s Series C has landed at $800 million, pushing the open-source inference platform to an $8.3 billion post-money valuation, the company announced via Business Wire. That is the kind of number that makes you sit up, especially for a company that only existed on paper four years ago. Aramco’s Prosperity7 Leads the Together AI Series C The round was led by Aramco Ventures, specifically through its Prosperity7 Ventures arm, the diversified venturing programme of Saudi Aramco’s investment vehicle. That is not a first encounter: The Next Web reports that Prosperity7 co-led Together AI’s Series B alongside General Catalyst, so…
The Venice AI Series A has landed at $65 million, valuing the two-year-old startup at $1 billion and marking its first external fundraise. The round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others joining in. The unicorn tag arrived fast, and, to Venice’s credit, the underlying numbers give it more substance than most. The company already has more than 850,000 unique visitors to its website, serves more than 3 million active users, and fields an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. Annualised run-rate revenues have topped $70 million, according to CEO…
Vint Cerf’s Google retirement brings to an end a two-decade chapter for the 83-year-old engineer who, alongside Robert Kahn, built the networking protocols that became the foundation of the modern internet. The news came not from a press release but from a warm public tribute: Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture, announced it during a panel at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute.’Vint… has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round…
The Clicks Communicator launch is getting its first proper preview, with Clicks Technology releasing a new hands-on video showing pre-production hardware and software ahead of a planned fourth-quarter shipping window. Price tag: $499. Ambition: replace the phone you hate with one you might actually enjoy using. Unveiled at CES on 2 January 2026, the Communicator was framed from the start as something specific. Clicks Technology’s announcement described it as ‘a second phone built for communication, not consumption’, positioning it as a companion to your main device rather than a replacement. That framing does a lot of work: it sidesteps the…
Tesla Cybercab production tests have begun on public roads in Austin, Texas, with a customer-specification unit that has no steering wheel and no pedals, according to a video posted on X. A safety monitor rides in the right passenger seat for now, but the car itself is built exactly as Tesla intends to sell it. That distinction matters. Previous Cybercab test vehicles, spotted in cities across the United States in recent weeks, were prototypes fitted with a steering wheel and pedals. Electrek reports that Tesla described these Austin runs as ‘engineering tests of the first production Cybercab,’ marking the first…
The OKX AI agent marketplace is now open to developers, letting autonomous software hire other software, settle payments via stablecoins, and build portable reputations on-chain. It is a grand pitch, and the company is serious about it. Called OKX AI, the platform follows a closed beta with 50 early AI service providers and is aimed squarely at crypto developers and solo entrepreneurs who want to automate parts of their businesses. No OKX account required to get started. What the OKX AI Agent Marketplace Actually Does The OKX AI agent marketplace builds on infrastructure OKX developed to give AI agents digital…
An AI job growth study published 30 June 2026 by Ramp and Revelio Labs has found that companies spending the most on AI are adding staff faster than their peers, including in the entry-level roles everyone is convinced are already gone. It is a more optimistic headline than the current news cycle deserves, and the authors are the first to say the fine print matters. What the AI Job Growth Study Actually Measured The paper matched enterprise AI spending data from Ramp against workforce records from Revelio Labs, covering 21,559 U.S. firms, the snippet characterised this as “nearly 22,000,” but…