Wikipedia challenging UK law it says exposes it to ‘manipulation and vandalism’

The charity that hosts Wikipedia is challenging the UK’s online safety legislation in the high court, saying some of its regulations would expose the site to “manipulation and vandalism”.In what could be the first judicial review related to the Online Safety Act, Wikimedia Foundation claims it is at risk of being subjected to the act’s toughest category 1 duties, which impose additional requirements on the biggest sites and apps.The foundation said if category 1 duties were imposed on it, the safety and privacy of Wikipedia’s army of volunteer editors would be undermined, its entries could be manipulated and vandalised, and resources would be diverted from protecting and improving the site.Announcing that it was seeking a judicial review of the categorisation regulations, the foundation’s lead counsel, Phil Bradley-Schmieg, said: “We are taking action now to protect Wikipedia’s volunteer users, as well as the global accessibility and integrity of free knowledge.”The foundation said it was not challenging the act as a whole, nor the existence of the requirements themselves, but the rules that decide how a category 1 platform is designated

Tech giants beat quarterly expectations as Trump’s tariffs hit the sector

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, and this week in tech news: Trump’s tariffs hit tech companies that move physical goods more than their digital-only counterparts. Two stories about AI’s effect on the labor market paint a murky picture. Meta released a standalone AI app, a product it claims already has a billion users through enforced omnipresence. OpenAI dialed back an obsequious version of ChatGPT

Pro-Russian hackers claim to have targeted several UK websites

A pro-Russian hacking group has claimed to have successfully targeted a range of UK websites, including local councils and the Association for Police and Crime Commissioners, during a three-day campaign.In a series of social media posts, the group calling itself NoName057(16) suggested it had made a number of websites temporarily inaccessible, although it is understood the attacks were not wholly successful.The hackers sought to flood a range of websites with internet traffic in what is known as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The group wrote on X: “Britain is invested in the escalation of the [Ukraine] conflict, and we are disconnecting its resources.”Its success was limited, however, with councils in Blackburn and Darwen and Exeter among those reporting that their websites were unaffected despite the hacking group’s claims of success

‘It cannot provide nuance’: UK experts warn AI therapy chatbots are not safe

Having an issue with your romantic relationship? Need to talk through something? Mark Zuckerberg has a solution for that: a chatbot. Meta’s chief executive believes everyone should have a therapist and if they don’t – artificial intelligence can do that job.“I personally have the belief that everyone should probably have a therapist,” he said last week. “It’s like someone they can just talk to throughout the day, or not necessarily throughout the day, but about whatever issues they’re worried about and for people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI.”The Guardian spoke to mental health clinicians who expressed concern about AI’s emerging role as a digital therapist

Amazon makes ‘fundamental leap forward in robotics’ with device having sense of touch

Amazon said it has made a “fundamental leap forward in robotics” after developing a robot with a sense of touch that will be capable of grabbing about three-quarters of the items in its vast warehouses.Vulcan – which launches at the US firm’s “Delivering the Future” event in Dortmund, Germany, on Wednesday and is to be deployed around the world in the next few years – is designed to help humans sort items for storage and then prepare them for delivery as the latest in a suite of robots which have an ever-growing role in the online retailer’s extensive operation.Aaron Parness, Amazon’s director of robotics, described Vulcan as a “fundamental leap forward in robotics. It’s not just seeing the world, it’s feeling it, enabling capabilities that were impossible for Amazon robots until now.”The robots will be able to identify objects by touch using AI to work out what they can and can’t handle and figuring out how best to pick them up

‘The crux of all evil’: what happened to the first city that tried to ban smartphones for under-14s?

At 3.12pm on a sunny spring afternoon in St Albans, Yasser Afghen reaches for the iPhone in his jeans pocket, hoping to use the three minutes before his son emerges from his year 1 primary class to scroll through his emails. As he lifts the phone to his face, Matthew Tavender, the head teacher of Cunningham Hill school, strides across the playground towards him. Afghen smiles apologetically, puts his phone away, and spends the remaining waiting time listening to the birdsong in the trees behind the school yard.A one-storey 1960s block with 14 classrooms backing on to a playing field, Cunningham Hill primary feels like an unlikely hub for a revolution