Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Trending Now Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Switch Off Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List All Series Walmart's new tap-to-pay sign has the internet roasting its AI art The retailer is finally embracing contactless payments. Unfortunately, its promotional keypad has two 7s. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan.

PCWorld reports that scalper bots are making it harder and more expensive to buy RAM, with bots accounting for 91% of traffic at one retailer. DDR5 RAM prices have surged 500% year-over-year, driven by AI data center demand and third-party resellers inflating prices on platforms like Amazon and Newegg. Popular kits such as the G.Skill Flare X5 are being heavily marked up, making PC building significantly more costly for everyday consumers. When an in-demand product gets scarce, the vultures of consumerism descend. Resellers insert themselves between something people want and suppliers, sucking up every possible dollar to be made. So it went with GPUs and webcams and toilet paper in the pandemic, so it goes with RAM in 2026. For at least one retailer, over 90% of the web traffic for RAM listings came from "scalper" bots.

Sainsbury's pauses AI cameras after shopper ousted Sainsbury's has suspended its use of live facial recognition technology at one of its London branches after a customer was wrongly challenged as a shoplifter and asked to leave. Matt Arnold, 46, was buying items at the East Dulwich store when he was stopped by management at a self-service till. Describing the experience as a terrifying glimpse of the future, he has warned that retail surveillance tech risks humiliating customers and creating a system where staff feel compelled to follow automated alerts without applying human logic. The supermarket said it had apologised to Arnold and claimed the mistake was caused by human error, but critics have called for the technology to be scrapped. The incident happened on 6 August as Arnold - a comedy promoter getting supplies for a stand-up event hosted at the next door Dulwich Hamlet Football Club - was waiting for a staff member to approve an alcohol purchase.

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Primark's new'supermarket tactic' to woo customers in online price war It is something I keep hearing shoppers say when I ask them whether they shop at the fast-fashion giant. It's definitely got more expensive, says 19-year-old student Eshal Malik as she browses the jewellery at Primark with a friend. But that might be about to change. Primark said on Monday that it was lowering prices on hundreds of clothing items, including jeans, jumpers and socks. It's the kind of headline you'd expect from M&S or Next, says retail analyst Natalie Berg, explaining that price cuts like this from such a low-cost retailer are surprising.

Once, video games came with lots of physical goodies, such as guides, maps and manuals. Those days are mostly gone, but gamers have, up to now, usually been able to rely on one thing they could literally get their hands on - a disc. But when pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto 6 went live on Wednesday, developer Rockstar said customers who opted for the physical edition would get a box that just contained a code for a digital download instead. It's not the first time a physical edition has launched this way. But if the makers of one of the biggest franchises in entertainment history has decided to follow suit, does that mean the disc is dead?

Motivated by real-life supply chain management, we study a repeated newsvendor problem in which the learner is a mediator that facilitates trades between suppliers and retailers in a sequence of supplier/retailer interactions. At each time step, a new supplier and retailer join the mediator's platform with a private production cost and utility function, respectively, and the platform proposes a unitary trading price. The supplier accepts the proposed price if it meets or exceeds their unitary production cost and communicates their decision to the platform; simultaneously, the retailer decides the quantity to purchase at the proposed trading price based on their private utility function and sends their decision to the platform. If the supplier accepts the trading price, the transaction proceeds, and the retailer purchases their chosen quantity of units, paying the product of this quantity and the trading price to the supplier. The mediator's objective is to maximize social welfare. We design an online mediator's pricing strategy that features sharp regret rates under some natural assumptions, and we investigate the necessity of these assumptions, proving that relaxing any of them leads to unlearnability.

Google is sprucing up its Gemini models, revamping search, and enabling AI agents in everything. There are also some spiffy new smart glasses coming this fall. Google just wrapped its keynote address at its annual I/O developer event . The company showed off a swath of new agentic AI features and some demos of its upcoming Android-powered smart glasses. As it has in the past few years, the spectacle largely revolved around Google's perpetual stream of AI efforts.

Why does Amazon have no Western rivals? Vitamins, repair tape and a jar of mango chutney - just some of what my household bought last month via Amazon's sprawling online shopping platform. We also shopped at the company's supermarket chain Whole Foods, streamed its TV shows, read books on Kindle e-readers, and browsed countless websites no doubt powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), its highly profitable cloud-computing business. And that isn't half of the interconnected products and services offered by the global behemoth, which earlier this year overtook US superstore giant Walmart to become the world's largest company by annual sales. But why does Amazon, launched by Jeff Bezos in 1995 as an online bookstore out of a rented garage, have so few serious rivals in the West when it comes to e-commerce?

How does live facial recognition work and how many police forces use it? Britain's biometrics watchdogs have warned that national oversight of AI-powered face scanning to catch criminals is lagging far behind the technology's rapid growth. With the Metropolitan police almost doubling the number of faces they scan in London over the past 12 months and a rising use of the technology by retailers in the UK, Prof William Webster, the biometrics commissioner for England and Wales, said the "slow pace of legislation was trying to catch up with the real world" and "the horse had gone before the cart". Dr Brian Plastow, who holds the same role in Scotland, warned the technology was "nowhere near as effective as the police claim it is" and said there was a "patchwork legal framework" throughout the UK. He said in England and Wales, police were "really just marking their own homework".