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Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon price rises in western Europe ‘highest in world’
Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video subscribers in western Europe have faced steeper price rises than customers anywhere else in the world over the past three years, according to research by Ampere Analysis. The finding highlights how the world’s biggest streaming services are increasingly relying on price increases, alongside advertising tiers, to fund content production…
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Royal grocer Waitrose in battle with Burnham ally over £100m taxpayer-backed spa town redevelopment
Waitrose has objected to a £100m redevelopment of Buxton’s Springs shopping centre, joining hundreds of local residents opposing plans by Manchester developer Capital & Centric. The scheme, backed by Labour-run High Peak Borough Council and taxpayer funding, would transform the 1980s shopping centre but cut the town’s main public car park from 431 to 142…
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AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick that also muted a dev’s headphones
Developer Matt Callaghan says he caught AliExpress, part of Alibaba, running hidden audio-based fingerprinting scripts that track visitors even though the sound is silenced to zero gain. He discovered the issue after noticing his Bluetooth headphones kept cutting audio from his phone whenever he opened AliExpress in Firefox or Chrome, tracing the cause to obfuscated…
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Thames Water creditors accused of ‘shuffling deckchairs’ with plan for new board
A consortium of Thames Water’s creditors has proposed installing a new board, including a former Yorkshire Water chief executive and a former Openreach boss, in an attempt to persuade the government against placing the struggling utility into temporary nationalisation. The move is designed to reassure ministers, particularly Andy Burnham, who has pushed for greater public…
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Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia
Australian post offices have started selling small paper “password books” for AU$4.90 (about US$3.51), and a viral social media post about the find has drawn a surprisingly warm response from security professionals who once dismissed the idea as poor practice. Where password books were traditionally seen as a security risk, many infosec commentators now argue…
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Inside story of the brazen WhatsApp group that told M9 crash teen when it was safe to go on a car robbing spree… and the infuriating reason Gardai know there is little they can do to stop them
A member of the so-called “M9 gang”, 17-year-old Kamil Pustkowski, was arrested driving a stolen car just three weeks before the crash that killed him and four other teenagers, but was released and back stealing cars the same night because Ireland’s only juvenile detention centre, Oberstown in Lusk, Co Dublin, had no available spaces. The…
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Fast-fashion giant Shein lowers value to $27bn for Hong Kong IPO
Shein, the China-founded fast-fashion retailer, has cut the valuation it is seeking for its long-delayed Hong Kong stock market listing to around $27bn (£19.8bn), a sharp drop from the near-$100bn it was worth at its 2022 private funding peak. The reduced price reflects mounting pressure on the company, which reported a $99m loss in the…
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Software should work, and talking about it needn’t be boring
This opinion piece from The Register argues that streamed tech conferences are usually too uneven to watch in full, but praises Software Should Work 2026, held in July, as a rare exception that rewards binge-watching from start to finish. The conference focuses on software reliability in its broadest sense, covering not just working code but…
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My Arms Are Longer Now – comedy stealth game sends lawlessness into new territory
An Australian studio called Toot Games is developing My Arms Are Longer Now, a comedy stealth game in which players control not a spy or thief but a single grotesquely elongated arm that slithers across floors, steals objects and slaps anyone in reach. Founded by Matthew Jackson and Millie Holten, who met through Melbourne’s improv…
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UK graduate job vacancies plunge to lowest in a decade
UK graduate job vacancies have fallen to their lowest level since records began a decade ago, with recruitment website Adzuna reporting just 8,383 university-leaver positions advertised in July, a 45% drop compared with the same month last year. The slump coincides with a record 262,820 students preparing to start university in September, deepening concern about…