Software

Excel, long seen as a dull but essential office tool, has become the unlikely subject of a growing online subculture where influencers build huge followings by showing off high-speed spreadsheet mastery. Creators such as London’s Dan Kidney and Los Angeles-based Jonathan Tristan post “speedrun” videos racing through self-designed obstacle courses and teach keyboard-only techniques, turning…

A Wired reporter bought a “super clone” fake Rolex online for $500 and had it serviced at Rolex’s flagship London store, where staff resized the bracelet without noticing it was counterfeit. The piece highlights how counterfeit Swiss watches have evolved from crude market-stall knock-offs into highly convincing replicas mass-produced by Chinese factories, sold discreetly through…

Relativity Networks, a startup developing hollow-core fibre optic technology, has raised $22 million in SAFE note funding to help data centre operators overcome the physical distance limits that increasingly constrain the AI compute boom. As firms spend heavily on ever-larger data centre campuses, network latency between distant clusters of GPUs has become a growing bottleneck,…

Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered that ClarityCheck, a reverse-image people-search service, left more than 9 million image files — including facial photographs of adults, teenagers and children — publicly accessible online, despite the site’s promise that searches are “private and secure.” A separate misconfiguration also exposed users’ email addresses and phone numbers. The exposure is…

Hot or Not, launched in 2000, let users upload photos to be rated by strangers on a 1-to-10 scale, quickly becoming one of the internet’s most-visited sites and pioneering the idea of turning subjective human judgement into structured, rankable data. Its influence shaped the design of later dating apps, particularly Tinder, whose swipe mechanism combined…

Raspberry Pi has launched a $600 Programming Jig designed to speed up batch provisioning of its Compute Module 5 (CM5) boards for industrial and embedded deployments. The device combines the provisioning host and module interface into a single unit, removing the need for a separate IO board or an additional host computer that was previously…