Online shopping giant Temu has agreed to work with the greeting card industry to remove copied designs from its site more quickly. Designers told the BBC the process for getting the plagiarised listings removed has been like the fairground game'whack-a-mole' with copied products re-appearing within days. Temu said protecting intellectual property was a top priority and that it was encouraging sellers to join the trial of a new takedown process specifically for the greetings card industry. Amanda Mountain, the co-founder of York-based Lola Design, discovered the catalogue of designs she had built up over a decade had nearly all been copied. She found the images she had created had been lifted and were being advertised by other sellers on cards and other products like t-shirts.

Face Check will scan new members' faces to ensure they don't match existing profiles. The move comes as romance scams continue to proliferate, with billions lost over the last decade. On Wednesday, Tinder announced that it was rolling out a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out "bad actors." Tinder claims its mandatory facial integration feature, called Face Check, is a first for a major dating app. During the sign up process, new members complete a "liveness check" by taking a short video selfie within the app.

US to announce'substantial' Russia sanctions The US government will impose a substantial pickup in sanctions against Russia as the fighting in Ukraine continues, according to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent's comments came just before Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte was due at the White House, in which he said he hopes to discuss how to deliver Trump's vision of peace in the conflict. Earlier in the day, Rutte said he believes that Trump is the only one who can get this done. At least seven people were killed, including two children, during intense Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukraine - just hours after Trump said plans for a meeting with Vladimir Putin in Budapest had been shelved. Bessent provided no further details on the incoming sanctions, but said they would be announced either after the close this afternoon or first thing tomorrow morning.

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck sued Google, alleging that the tech giant's artificial intelligence systems generated "outrageously false" information about him. On Wednesday, Starbuck said in the lawsuit, filed in Delaware state court, that Google's AI systems falsely called him a "child rapist," "serial sexual abuser" and "shooter" in response to user queries and delivered defamatory statements to millions of users. "Hallucinations are a well-known issue for all LLMs, which we disclose and work hard to minimise," Castaneda said. "But as everyone knows, if you're creative enough, you can prompt a chatbot to say something misleading." Starbuck is best known for opposing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Could a self-monitoring system for criminals replace prisons one day? Future Chronicles is our regular speculative look at inventions yet to come. In this latest installment, we journey to 2050, when technology had been developed so that criminals could be monitored at home. "It's no surprise that the first countries to abolish prisons were Scandinavian " In the 2020s, the US was spending an eye-watering $182 billion a year on locking up its citizens. No other country imprisoned as many people or spent as much in doing so.

How successful is Ukraine's'gas war' against Russia? How will Putin travel to Hungary with an ICC arrest warrant? How much of Europe's oil still comes from Russia? A bystander filmed the moment a Russian drone struck near an apartment building in Sumy, Ukraine, injuring several people. Russia launched a wave of deadly drone and missile attacks on cities across Ukraine on Tuesday.

At least seven people have been killed including two children during intense Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukraine, says President Volodymyr Zelensky. A kindergarten was hit in Ukraine's second biggest city Kharkiv and there was widespread damage in Kyiv, in a series of attacks that Zelensky said proved Moscow had not come under enough pressure for its continued war. At least 27 people including children are reported hurt. Hours earlier, US President Donald Trump said his plans for an imminent summit in Budapest with Russia's Vladimir Putin had been shelved as he did not want a wasted meeting. The Kremlin has rejected calls for a ceasefire along the current front lines made both by Trump and European leaders.

In April 2019, the Mayor of London introduced the ULEZ, an area in which drivers of more polluting vehicles must pay a daily charge of £12.50. It aims to reduce air pollution emissions from road transport and accelerating compliance with EU air quality standards. It previously only covered the same area of central London as the Congestion Charge, but it was expanded across all London boroughs on August 29, 2023. ULEZ is one of several London air pollution policies introduced since 2016 like the Low Emission Zone, Low Emission Bus Zones, and bus and taxi electrification. Share or comment on this article: Sadiq Khan's hated ULEZ expansion had NO impact on air pollution while raking in millions from drivers

The bare-bones Mac writing app represents a literalist sensibility that is coming back into vogue as A.I. destabilizes our technological interactions. The so-called desktop first appeared on a home computer in 1981, with the release of the Xerox 8010 Star Information System. That device pioneered the graphical-user interface, or G.U.I., a convenient series of visual metaphors that allows us to interact more easily with our machines. The most basic computing interface is the command-line prompt, the empty box in which users write instructions in code directly to the machine; the Xerox Star replaced that forbidding vacuum with a friendly illustration of a tabletop surface, textured in patterned pixels, scattered with icons for folders, spreadsheets, and filing trays. A 1982 paper on the device described the then novel system: "Users are encouraged to think of the objects on the Desktop in physical terms.

Scientists have identified more than fifty ways that houses can ignite. It's possible to defend against all of them--but it's arduous, and homeowners can't do it alone. In June, 2012, hundreds of homes in Mountain Shadows, Colorado, a subdivision in the foothills of the Rockies, were reduced to ash during the wind-whipped Waldo Canyon Fire. On a cul-de-sac called Hot Springs Court, however, four dwellings somehow remained standing. The mystery of their survival nagged at Alex Maranghides, a fire-protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (), who worked with several colleagues on a meticulous reconstruction of the fire. How did the homes make it through? Was there something special about them--a fireproof roof, say, or a fancy sprinkler system? The team collected weather reports, topographic data, G.P.S. records from fire engines, photos, videos, and property-damage reports.