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6 days ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
In September 2024, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, announced a return-to-office mandate that would require the firm’s office staff to be on-site five days per week. Although Amazon’s employees reportedly began ‘rage applying’ for other jobs, and a petition protesting the decision gathered signatures from 30,000 staff, many commentators predicted the initiative would inspire a wide-scale shift back to in-office working. Eight months on, that prediction has yet to come true.
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1 week ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
With weeks of cyber chaos for Marks and Spencer, an attack on the Co-op and now Harrods being targeted by cyber criminals, UK retailers are on high alert. On the Easter weekend, M&S suffered a cyber incident that affected contactless payments and knocked its web store offline. Its stock was also affected, with shelves running empty in its brick-and-mortar shops.
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1 week ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
When your phone battery’s in the red zone with quickly depleting power reserves, spotting a free charging station can feel like encountering a lush oasis in the blistering desert heat. However, people should be wary of using public ports to charge their devices. A new variation of an old cyber attack, called juice jacking, could sneak malware onto your device while it’s plugged in.
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2 weeks ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
The prevalence of the generative AI brings to light important questions around who owns our data and whether or not we have a say in how it’s used. Almost every platform markets AI features. In our professional lives, AI pop-ups offer to summarise Zoom meetings or guide us through Salesforce’s CRM, meanwhile users of Meta’s Instagram and WhatsApp have compared removing its AI chatbot to “opting out of a bad blind date”.
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2 weeks ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
From the ancient Akkadians who scraped cuneiform symbols into clay tokens, to the oracle bone script used for divination in China millennia ago, through to the humble blue Biro, our writing systems have taken many forms throughout history. But how strange it would seem to a papyrus-toting Egyptian scribe that our latest system involves no scraping, pens or ink at all — just pixels on screens and the ones and zeros of intangible computer code.
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3 weeks ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
Generative AI’s greatest functional flaw is perhaps its tendency to hallucinate; that is, to make stuff up. These hallucinations are not always trivial. GenAI systems have been caught citing historical events, people or academic papers, for instance, that simply don’t exist. Hallucinations may limit the effectiveness of GenAI tools, as users are often far too trusting of AI-generated outputs, regardless of their accuracy.
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4 weeks ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
Public trust in digital platforms is waning. Meanwhile, generative AI systems are hoovering up every byte of data on the public internet – and sometimes the not-so-public internet, such as Meta’s alleged use of millions of pirated books to train its AI. Carissa Véliz is an author and associate professor of philosophy and ethics at the University of Oxford. She is also a staunch advocate for privacy.
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4 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Tamlin Magee
In 1980, a tall, thin man landed in Buenos Aires airport, at the height of Argentina’s military dictatorship. His name was Luca Prodan, a Scottish-Italian rocker, and he had just finished the last of his methadone on the flight over. His arrival would soon send shockwaves through Argentina when he started a band called Sumo, acquainted the country with post-punk, and became a national legend who lives on, his music still earning hundreds of millions of streams.
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1 month ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
With ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs crashing the economy and endless bellicose rhetoric, there are few areas where the Trump administration has not disrupted business-as-usual, at home or abroad. Cybersecurity is one particular arena facing turbulence. Last month, Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defence, was reported to have ordered a pause on offensive cyber operations against Russia. However, this has since been denied by the Pentagon.
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1 month ago | 
raconteur.net | Tamlin Magee
Businesses in the UK are taking less responsibility for cybersecurity at the board level, according to the Department for Science, Information and Technology’s (DSIT) Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025. Just over four in 10 businesses discovered a cyber breach over the past 12 months. Of those, phishing attempts – when attackers send malicious emails disguised as legitimate communications – were by far the most common, with 18% of all businesses in the UK having suffered such an attack.
