Welcome to our annual list of the worst, least successful, and simply dumbest technologies of the year. We like to think there's a lesson in every technological misadventure. But when technology becomes dependent on power, sometimes the takeaway is simpler: it would have been better to stay away. Here are some of the more notable ones . Each time you've heard a borderline outlandish idea of what AI will be capable of, it often turns out that Sam Altman was, if not the first to articulate it, at least the most persuasive and influential voice behind it. For more than a decade he has been known in Silicon Valley as a world-class fundraiser and persuader.

Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. When Recall was introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings.

Updated on April 3, 2025: The new version of Microsoft Copilot is now rolling out to all Windows users. It's available for Windows 10 and Windows 11 and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store. Previously, it was only available to Windows Insiders via preview builds, but now everyone can start using the new features. Original story from March 5, 2025: Microsoft has once again made changes to Copilot, with the new version now being delivered to Windows 11 Insiders. The redesign is meant to rethink the experience from the ground up, and that means Copilot is now a native app that's directly integrated into the operating system.

Microsoft has once again made changes to Copilot, with the new version now being delivered to Windows 11 Insiders. The redesign is meant to rethink the experience from the ground up, and that means Copilot is now a native app that's directly integrated into the operating system. According to Windows Latest, initial testers say the new Copilot Windows 11 app works even better than the ChatGPT desktop app. This is mainly due to the fact that Copilot works and responds with almost no delays and requires much less memory. Microsoft has redeveloped the Copilot app from scratch, utilizing Windows technologies like XAML and WinUI.

A new investigation from The Markup claims the parent company of Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid and other dating apps turns a blind eye to allegedly abusive users on its platforms. The 18-month investigation found instances in which users who were repeatedly reported for drugging or assaulting their dates remained on the apps. One such case involves a Colorado-based cardiologist named Stephen Matthews. Over several years, multiple women on Match's platforms reported him for drugging or raping them. Despite these reports, his Tinder profile was at one point given Standout status, reserved for popular profiles and often requiring in-app currency to interact with.

The world needs whistleblowers, perhaps now more than ever. But whistleblowing has never been more dangerous. Jennifer Gibson has seen this problem develop up close. As a whistleblower lawyer based in the U.K., she has represented concerned insiders in the national security and tech worlds for more than a decade. She's represented family members of civilians killed by Pentagon drone strikes, and executives from top tech companies who've turned against their billionaire bosses.

It's one of the biggest companies in the world, but Apple is one of the few tech firms yet to unveil a foldable device. That may be soon about to change, however, because Apple is allegedly readying its first foldable iPhone – following in the footsteps of Samsung, Huawei and Motorola. Now, MailOnline has turned to AI sensation ChatGPT to imagine what the so-called'iPhone Flip' will look like. According to the chatbot, the high-end device will have a flexible OLED display with ultra-thin bezels and a polished titanium finish. Similar to rival Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip, it has a horizonal crease through the middle of the main screen and a smaller screen for use when folded.

Chinese engineers developing chips for artificial intelligence that can be used in "advanced weapons systems" have gained access to cutting-edge UK technology, the Guardian can reveal. Described by analysts as "China's premier AI chip designers", Moore Threads and Biren Technology are subject to US export restrictions over their development of chips that "can be used to provide artificial intelligence capabilities to further development of weapons of mass destruction, advanced weapons systems and hi-tech surveillance applications that create national security concerns". However, prior to the US blacklisting in 2023, the two companies secured extensive licences with the UK-based Imagination Technologies, which is among a handful of firms worldwide that design an advanced type of microchip crucial for AI systems, and is regarded as a jewel of the UK's technology industry. A spokesperson for Imagination said: "At no stage has Imagination (or its owners) considered or implemented transactions with third parties with the aim of enabling China or any other nation state to use or direct Imagination technology for state or military end uses." While Imagination's representatives confirmed the existence of the licences with Moore Threads and Biren Technology, they denied claims that the company, under the ownership of a private equity fund backed with Chinese state money, sought to deliberately transfer its state-of-the-art secrets to China. Two former senior Imagination insiders claim that "knowledge transfer programmes" accompanying the licences were so comprehensive that they risked the Chinese companies learning how to replicate Imagination's expertise.

Compliance management plays an important role in mitigating insider threats. Incentive design is a proactive and non-invasive approach to achieving compliance by aligning an insider's incentive with the defender's security objective, which motivates (rather than commands) an insider to act in the organization's interests. Controlling insiders' incentives for population-level compliance is challenging because they are neither precisely known nor directly controllable. To this end, we develop ZETAR, a zero-trust audit and recommendation framework, to provide a quantitative approach to model insiders' incentives and design customized recommendation policies to improve their compliance. We formulate primal and dual convex programs to compute the optimal bespoke recommendation policies. We create the theoretical underpinning for understanding trust, compliance, and satisfaction, which leads to scoring mechanisms of how compliant and persuadable an insider is. After classifying insiders as malicious, self-interested, or amenable based on their incentive misalignment levels with the defender, we establish bespoke information disclosure principles for these insiders of different incentive categories. We identify the policy separability principle and the set convexity, which enable finite-step algorithms to efficiently learn the Completely Trustworthy (CT) policy set when insiders' incentives are unknown. Finally, we present a case study to corroborate the design. Our results show that ZETAR can well adapt to insiders with different risk and compliance attitudes and significantly improve compliance. Moreover, trustworthy recommendations can provably promote cyber hygiene and insiders' satisfaction.

Insider plans to begin experimenting with ways to leverage AI in its journalism, its global editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson told Axios. Why it matters: "A tsunami is coming," Carlson said. "We can either ride it or get wiped out by it." Details: The company will set up a working group first to test ways to responsibly incorporate AI into its workflow before rolling out a set of AI rules and best practices to the broader newsroom. The rest of the newsroom will be encouraged to use AI to generate outlines for stories, fix typos, craft headlines optimized for search engines, and prep interview questions.