Can Nigeria's drone industry deliver Africa's defence sovereignty Across Africa, the ability to defend borders, monitor territory and protect critical infrastructure remains heavily dependent on foreign suppliers. Turkish drones patrol borders, Chinese surveillance systems monitor cities and Russian fighter jets form the backbone of several air forces. For decades, African militaries have turned abroad for critical defence technologies, leaving the continent largely positioned as a buyer rather than a producer. An Abuja-based start-up is attempting to change that equation. Terra Industries, founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka, both in their early twenties, designs and manufactures drones, autonomous surveillance towers and unmanned ground vehicles from facilities in Abuja and Accra.

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Amid live coding sessions and Silicon Valley optimism, the UN's AI for Good summit wrestled with an increasingly urgent question: Can global governance catch up before the technology races beyond its control? Dodge past the live onstage coding sessions, AI refresher courses, an obstacle course of gizmos, round people walking round with glowing green silent-disco-style headphones blaring UN panel discussions into your ears, and you can take a pause for breath. But you might find yourself in the Networking Zone, on a rotating seating contraption called UFOTECH that looks more like the kind of lazy Susan you'd encounter at a Chinese restaurant than the networking bench it is designed to function as. This is the AI for Good summit, organized by the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where representatives from the private and public sectors try to discuss how to harness the technology for the benefit, rather than the detriment, of humanity. While Silicon Valley execs and AI lab leaders are testifying to lawmakers in Washington about the risks of superintelligence, and the White House slaps export controls on chips, the UN AI for Good Summit--now in its 10th year--is focused on much more idealistic goals.

In a closed-door simulation, insurers played out their response to a mass disruption by China's Volt Typhoon hackers--and found a nightmare scenario. It's around an hour and 10 minutes into the role-playing game I've been invited to observe, a simulated catastrophic cyberattack on US water utilities, when the whole thing begins to feel less like a fun afternoon playing Dungeons & Dragons and more like a plausible threat to civilization. A full 24 hours of in-game time have passed since hackers disrupted 5,000 water utilities across the United States in this imagined scenario. Joshua Corman, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency strategist serving as our dungeon master, stands at the front of a conference space in an office tower high above Times Square, narrating the latest updates to the game's participants, a few dozen insurance executives set up in six teams. All of them have gone disturbingly silent. It's about to get harder," Corman says. "I'm going to share a few things, and it's going to hurt." It is, of course, still the same April afternoon as when we started--but in game time, the second-order effects of widespread water outages have started to become clear. Food refrigeration systems are failing at cold storage warehouses. Water-dependent drug and chemical manufacturing has been bottlenecked, leading to insulin shortages. Data centers' cooling systems are failing, causing outages of cloud services. Most critically, 2,000 hospitals are without water, hampering patient care and in some cases leading to evacuations as HVAC systems shut down and the July heat--the game takes place just before Independence Day in 2027--bakes facilities. Worse yet, Corman is playing a looping video onscreen, at the front of the room, showing a burst water main: The hackers have managed to trigger not just IT disruption but also, in at least some cases, real physical destruction that will take far longer to fix. "Everyone downstream is without water pressure," Corman says. "There are no breaks in real incident response," Corman explains just before the giant water pipe starts gushing onscreen. "If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom.

Cobalt Park in North Tyneside was designated as an'AI growth zone' during the US president's visit. Cobalt Park in North Tyneside was designated as an'AI growth zone' during the US president's visit. OpenAI's apparent failure to visit key site raises questions over UK investment Exclusive: £20bn of'potential' £30bn AI investment touted by UK ministers appears to have been hypothetical It was to be the biggest undertaking in Britain for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT . But the plans were paused in April, with an OpenAI spokesperson citing concerns over regulation and high energy costs . Now the Guardian can reveal that OpenAI does not appear to have visited one of Stargate UK's key sites - and that £20bn of the "potential" £30bn in investment touted by the UK government appears to have been totally hypothetical.

Is the war entering a new phase? Ukrainian officials say at least four people have been killed and 10 injured in the latest Russian attacks, a day after Moscow hit Kyiv in the deadliest series of attacks this year. In the bordering Sumy region, two women, an elderly man and a toddler were killed and three others injured after a Russian drone hit a residential apartment building, Oleh Hryhorov, head of the regional military administration, said on Friday. Two of the injured women remain in hospital, said Vilkul, adding that nine apartment blocks, a school building, a company, several shops, garages and about 10 vehicles were damaged. Two residential buildings were also cut off from the gas supply.

Selling server infrastructure would put Meta in competition with Amazon and Google. Meta could spin up its own cloud business to make use of the infrastructure investments it's made to train and run AI models, reports . The social media provider has traditionally paid for risky bets on smart glasses and virtual reality with the money it makes through its extensive online ad business. Selling cloud infrastructure would put Meta in direct competition with Amazon, Google and newly-minted cloud provider SpaceX. The cloud business could offer multiple services, according to the report, like selling access to AI models run on Meta's infrastructure, or leasing the computing power of its data centers to other companies looking to train AI.

The UN panel said its approach to AI was'scientific, not political'. The UN panel said its approach to AI was'scientific, not political'. A new United Nations report warns that the development of artificial intelligence may exacerbate global inequality and proposes a shared framework for how to responsibly develop AI, as adoption and investment into the technology accelerates unevenly across the world. "Access to AI tools alone does not produce equal benefit," the report states. "Countries that rely on foreign models, cloud infrastructure and data pipelines may gain access to AI while losing practical control over its standards, safeguards and local fit."

The Chinese supercomputer LineShine was ranked as the fastest in the world, despite not using any GPUs. China now has the world's fastest supercomputer, overtaking the United States. The system, known as LineShine and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, displaced the US system El Capitan from the top spot in the TOP500 ranking in terms of computing power. The breakthrough comes amid an intense competition between Beijing and Washington for technological supremacy, marked by high tariffs and restrictions on a wide range of hardware components and software. Since 1993, the TOP500 ranking has identified the world's most powerful supercomputers every six months through a series of standardized benchmarks that evaluate each system's performance, taking into account both its theoretical speed and its real-world performance, as well as its energy efficiency.

Plus: Former national security advisor John Bolton pleads guilty in classified-materials case, Microsoft helps take down major infostealer infrastructure, and more. A WIRED investigation this week offers insight into a predictive policing program in Bristol, England that has involved 23 separate models over more than a decade, intended to score the likelihood of specific individuals will perpetrate or be victims of different crimes. The investigation draws on data from public records requests and other reporting to reveal a messy law enforcement apparatus that has real implications for the community--but that most people in the area know nothing about. After the identities of members of Peter Thiel's private "Dialog" group were exposed last week, the organization claimed that a "criminal" hacker was behind the breach. But evidence shows that members' personal information--including that of a White House intelligence official and an active-duty special operations officer --was publicly accessible and likely exposed as the result of a Dialog website misconfiguration .