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".

Plus: The NSA tests Anthropic's Mythos Preview to find vulnerabilities, a Finnish teen is charged over the Scattered Spider hacking spree, and more. A gunman attempted to enter the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, DC, last weekend, while President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other administration officials were in attendance. Media reports and Trump himself quickly identified the suspected shooter as 31-year-old engineer and computer scientist Cole Tomas Allen. The California resident was arrested at the scene on Saturday and appeared Monday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia to face three federal charges: attempting to assassinate the president, transportation of a firearm in interstate commerce, and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence. The authentication standards body known as the FIDO Alliance announced working groups this week along with Google and Mastercard to develop technical guardrails for validating and protecting transactions initiated by an AI agent .

Maryland is set to become the first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores after Gov. Wes Moore said he will sign the new law taking effect October 2026.

Online retailing has become increasingly popular over the last decades [17, 28, 52]. The way of product ranking is the crux for online retailers because it determines the consumers' shopping behaviors [17] and thus influences the retailers' revenue [20, 49]. For instance, the probability of consumers' purchasing from a firm or clicking an advertisement is strongly related to the display order[8,3,33].

Shipping experts say the big winter storm across a wide swath of the country should be business as usual--if their safeguards hold. Up to two-thirds of the US is facing down the threat of serious snow, cold, and ice this weekend, with the potential to snarl roads (and the businesses that depend on them) from Texas up to New York City . At this point, grocery stores, logistics experts, warehouse operators, and trucking companies have been prepping for days. Still, the effects on the supply chain--and the retail store shelves that depend on them--are yet to be determined. On one hand, this is winter business as usual.

As vehicles grow more software-dependent, repairing them has become harder than ever. A bill in the US House called the Repair Act would ease those restrictions, but it comes with caveats. Every time you get behind the wheel, your car is collecting data about you. Where you go, how fast you're driving, how hard you brake, and even how much you weigh. All of that data is not typically available to the vehicle owner.

Plus: Amazon has listed retailers' goods without their permission Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers deployed an invisible automated intelligence network, known as a "digital targeting web," as part of a NATO exercise called Hedgehog in the damp forests of Estonia's eastern territories. The system had been cobbled together over the course of four months--an astonishing pace for weapons development, which is usually measured in years. Its purpose is to connect everything that looks for targets--"sensors," in military lingo--and everything that fires on them ("shooters") to a single, shared wireless electronic brain. Eighty years after total war last transformed the continent, the Hedgehog tests signal a brutal new calculus of European defense. But leaning too much on this new mathematics of warfare could be a risky bet. This story is from the next print issue of magazine.

Instacart settles Federal Trade Commission's claim it deceived US shoppers Instacart has agreed to pay $60m in refunds to settle allegations brought by the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that the online grocery delivery platform deceived consumers about its membership programme and free delivery offers. According to court documents filed in San Francisco on Thursday, Instacart's offer of "free delivery" for first orders was illusory because shoppers were charged other fees, the FTC alleged. "The FTC is focused on monitoring online delivery services to ensure that competitors are transparently competing on price and delivery terms," said Christopher Mufarrige, who leads the FTC's consumer protection work. An Instacart spokesperson said the company flatly denies any allegations of wrongdoing, but that the settlement allows the company to focus on shoppers and retailers. "We provide straightforward marketing, transparent pricing and fees, clear terms, easy cancellation, and generous refund policies -- all in full compliance with the law and exceeding industry norms," the spokesperson said.

With a quarter of people in the UK using AI to find products, marketers must not only appeal to shoppers directly but to AI bots and their opaque decision-making process. With a quarter of people in the UK using AI to find products, marketers must not only appeal to shoppers directly but to AI bots and their opaque decision-making process. 'What to buy Dad for Christmas': is retail ready for the AI shopping shift? Consumer test drive: can AI do your Xmas gift shopping for you? While traditional internet search, social media - especially TikTok and Instagram - and simply wandering a local high street will still be the main routes to presents for most this year, about a quarter of people in the UK are already using AI to find the right products, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Rachael Dunfell knew two things about her husband's 21-year-old cousin: that he liked specialised racing bikes and that he was interested in the Vikings. But those pieces of information yielded few ideas for a suitable Christmas gift. So Rachael, 33, from Manchester, turned to artificial intelligence. She inputted his age, his hobby and his interest into Copilot, the Microsoft-owned chatbot, which led her to the website of a niche retailer that sells Viking-themed metal bike parts. It's just something that I really would never have known existed, she said, but it was perfect.