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

Mark Zuckerberg tried to convince us he was human. Sorry, ZuckBot: you’ve failed | Arwa Mahdawi

Over the past few years Mark Zuckerberg has been conducting a very expensive experiment. If he grows his hair and revamps his wardrobe, will it make him seem more relatable? If he takes up mixed martial arts, goes wild boar hunting, and tells manosphere-adjacent podcasters such as Joe Rogan that companies need more “masculine energy”, will red-blooded American males respect him? With the help of a small army of stylists, personal trainers and PR gurus, could Zuck transform himself from an unlikable dork into an alpha bro?For a brief moment, the answer to all that seemed to be a tentative “yes”. Zuck’s shock of shaggy new hair made the billionaire seem less like three Lego figures in a trenchcoat and more like an adult human male. His gold chains and jazzy new outfits sparked excited chatter of a “Zucknaissance”. The Meta billionaire also had a lucky break, PR-wise, in 2023 when Elon Musk, the world’s least self-aware man, challenged him to a cage brawl