Consumers urged to watch out for Black Friday scams and bad deals – business live

My colleagues at The Filter have helpfully rounded up the best offers in the UK today, recommending good on products which they’ve tested or have been recommended by product experts.Australia’s consumer regulator has warned that artificial intelligence is making it even harder to identify deceptive retailers, as so-called “ghost store” operators take advantage of Christmas and Black Friday to lure shoppers to their websites….Researchers at cybersecurity firm NordVPN have discovered a sharp rise in fraudulent websites aimed at Black Friday shoppers.Their data shows a 232% rise in the number of fake Amazon stores appearing on the internet, and another 525% rise in the number of fraudulent eBay sites.NordVPN says:Many of these sites are almost indistinguishable from the real thing - complete with copied branding, AI-generated product listings and convincing checkout pages designed solely to harvest personal and payment information

‘A step-change’: tech firms battle for undersea dominance with submarine drones

Flying drones used during the Ukraine war have changed land battle tactics for ever. Now the same thing appears to be happening under the sea.Navies around the world are racing to add autonomous submarines. The UK’s Royal Navy is planning a fleet of underwater uncrewed vehicles (UUVs) which will, for the first time, take a leading role in tracking submarines and protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Australia has committed to spending $1

One in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, NSPCC finds

Nearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone’s personal life.The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a child who has experienced online blackmail, while two in five said they rarely or never talked to their children about the subject.The National Crime Agency has said that it is receiving more than 110 reports a month of child sextortion attempts, where criminal gangs trick teenagers into sending intimate pictures of themselves and then blackmail them.Agencies across the UK, US and Australia have confirmed a rising number of sextortion cases involving teenage boys and young adult males being targeted by cyber-criminal gangs based in west Africa or south-east Asia, some of which have ended in tragedy. Murray Dowey, a 16-year-old from Dunblane, Scotland, killed himself in 2023 after becoming a victim of sextortion on Instagram and Dinal De Alwis, 16, killed himself in Sutton, south London, in October 2022 after being blackmailed over nude photographs

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation

Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side.The degree of increased division – known as “affective polarisation” – achieved in one week by the changes the academics made to X users’ feeds was as great as would have on average taken three years between 1978 and 2020.Most of the more than 1,000 users who took part in the experiment during the 2024 US presidential election did not notice that the tone of their feed had been changed.The campaign was marked by divisive viral posts on X, including a fake image of Kamala Harris cosying up to Jeffrey Epstein at a gala and an AI-generated image posted by Musk of Kamala Harris dressed as a communist dictator that had 84m views

Chess: Sindarov, 19, becomes youngest World Cup winner as London Classic begins

Javokhir Sindarov, 19, became the youngest ever winner of the Fide knockout World Cup on Wednesday when the Uzbek teenager defeated China’s Wei Yi 2.5-1.5 in the final at Goa. Ukraine’s Ruslan Ponomariov had been a year younger in 2002, but that World Cup had also doubled as the Fide world championship in a period when the global title was disputed.Wei was the favourite, but handicapped himself by poor time management in the decisive game

Iga Swiatek: ‘I didn’t want to give any points for free – it’s a Wimbledon final and I wanted to win’

SW19 champion baffled by post-match suggestions she should have let Amanda Anisimova win one game in grand slam final as she turns focus to Australian Open in 2026In the coming months, if and when her schedule allows, Iga Swiatek will make a pilgrimage to London and the All England Club, the scene of her biggest and, she admits, most surprising triumph. In July, the 24-year-old won her first Wimbledon title and sixth grand slam title in all, crushing a hapless Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 in the final.It was the undoubted highlight of an up-and-down year for the Pole, who struggled on her best surface of clay but who will end 2025 ranked No 2, her fourth year in a row finishing inside the world’s top two.It is a quirk unique to Wimbledon that the singles’ champions are given honorary membership to the All England Club, granting them access any time they choose. Like many before her, Swiatek is keen to experience the sport’s most storied venue when fans and her fellow players are not around