Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series The job is to help people in relationships with AI bots. Anna Iovine is the associate editor of features at Mashable. Previously, as the sex and relationships reporter, she covered topics ranging from dating apps to pelvic pain. Before Mashable, Anna was a social editor at VICE and freelanced for publications such as Slate and the Columbia Journalism Review. Follow her on Bluesky .

Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Save over $900 on this MacBook Air while you still can. The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. There's a reason MacBooks typically come with sky-high price tags -- they deliver Apple's top features in a sleek, highly portable package.

Proton's Andy Yen Says It Will Have To Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI? In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology . It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone's data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever. Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product--whether people want it or not--is driving new users in droves to Proton's products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. Yet Yen is anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo--just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that's more voluntary and preserves users' privacy far more than the typical tech giant. That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen's views don't cut cleanly across party lines--from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden's leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that's not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts. ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You're a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right? I'm not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator.

Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series The back-to-school sale prices end on Aug. 23. Lauren Allain is a freelance journalist covering deals at Mashable. She graduated from Western Washington University with a B.A. in journalism and holds an M.B.A from Webster Leiden. You can find more of her work online from publications including Reader's Digest, U.S. News & World Report, Seattle Refined, and more. When she's not writing, Lauren prefers to be outside hiking, bouldering, swimming, or searching for the perfect location for all three.

Drone video shows cattle in parched landscape across drought-hit farmland as Britain endures one of its driest summers on record. More than two-thirds of England is now in drought, according to officials. Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Can Trump limit birthright citizenship?

AI to help planes avoid climate-warming'sky graffiti' We've all looked up and seen the white lines trailing behind aircraft in the sky. Known as contrails, these icy clouds contribute to climate change, and scientists have been trying to work out how to stop them. Now, a £5m UK trial will test whether AI can help, by predicting where warming contrails are likely to form and getting planes to avoid those areas. The 30-month Operation Blue Skies project brings together Google, the UK government, the Met Office, air traffic control provider National Air Traffic Services (NATS) and academic researchers. It will focus on the Shanwick Oceanic airspace in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor which accounts for approximately 5% of global contrail warming.

There are many tech irritants that are a scourge of modern life, yet we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them ... until now T he "dickover" is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as "a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user". Essentially, it is the thing (or more often, things) you have to click away in order to read the thing you wanted to read. It is the "accept cookies" box, the "allow notifications?" box, the "sign in with Google" box, the pop-up video box, etc. We shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that dickovers are the only terrible thing about technology in 2026.

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) is currently taking place in Bremen, Germany. The first couple of days saw the attendees enjoy some of the many tutorials and workshops on offer. The official opening ceremony took place yesterday morning (Monday 17 August). Find out what the participants have been getting up to so far. Toby Walsh, UNSW, IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Ethics Co-Chair, will deliver his AI Lecture, on Mon, Aug 17. Open to the general public, it offers a preview of themes explored in his forthcoming book, God AI: Boom or Doom?

Is the war entering a new phase? Russian officials have reported more than 620 overnight drones targeting Moscow, in what appears to be one of Ukraine's largest attacks on the Russian capital in years. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Russian defences shot down 180 drones over the capital region between Monday evening and 5am (02:00 GMT) on Tuesday. He said 17 more drones were shot down en route to the capital later. The drone attack wounded three people, including a 10-year-old girl, Moscow region's Governor Andrey Vorobyov said on Telegram.

German drone maker Helsing has enlisted Japanese e-commerce and finance firm Rakuten to help finalize a deal to sell its unmanned systems to Japan's army, a spokesperson for Rakuten said on Monday. Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force is currently testing Helsing's HX-2 strike drone, as Tokyo looks to modernize its military and counter an increasingly assertive China. The field tests will run until the end of September, the spokesperson said. Helsing struck an "initial agreement" for the Japanese government to use its systems earlier this year, a spokesperson for the Munich-based company said, adding that the move was made possible by an unnamed "local brokerage partner." Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.