Games like Roblox are played by millions of children globally – but some researchers warn dark design patterns embedded in them are difficult to avoid

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Over the last decade, Dean has amassed a healthy collection of video games, from smash hits to cult classics. His digital library is like a modern day Blockbuster, all readily accessible with just a click or two. But his son, Sam, has eyes for only one video game: Roblox, the behemoth virtual universe-slash-video game that’s among the most popular on the planet.

The company reports that more than 97 million people log on to Roblox every day. Around 40% of those are, like Sam, under 13 years of age. In 2024, Roblox generated around A$5.6bn (US$3.6bn) in revenue, largely through purchases of “Robux”, its virtual currency, with the average user dropping around A$25 per month.

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CrowdStrike CEO announces 5% of workforce to be slashed globally, citing artificial intelligence efficiencies created in the business

The cybersecurity company that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to “AI efficiency”.

In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business.

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Researchers say AI could give every developing country a vital early warning system of extreme events

Weather forecasting has gradually been getting more and more sophisticated. It has also got far more important as the climate gets more unpredictable and extreme events threaten to cause massive economic damage and loss of life. So an early warning system is vital.

Ever larger computer systems making millions of calculations over many hours are now part of the daily forecasting in most developed countries. Sadly large parts of the world, many very vulnerable to dangerous climate events, do not have the money, personnel or computing power to develop the 10-day forecasting system they need.

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Company referred to policy for restricting content when governments say material goes ‘against local law’

Meta has banned a prominent Muslim news page on Instagram in India at the government’s request, the account’s founder said on Wednesday, denouncing the move as “censorship” as hostilities escalate between India and Pakistan.

Instagram users in India trying to access posts from the handle @Muslim – a page with 6.7 million followers – were met with a message stating: “Account not available in India. This is because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content.”

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Whether you want to bolster your home’s security or simply make sure you know when someone is at the door, the latest generation of smart doorbells will help put your mind at ease

• The best robot vacuums to keep your home clean and dust free

Doorbells have evolved. Today, they watch us as we approach, let the people inside the home know we’re coming sooner than our finger can hit the button, and give them a good look at our faces before they open the door. They’re essentially security cameras with a chime function.

If you haven’t already installed one of these handy tools, there’s a huge array available. Choosing the best video doorbell can be a bewildering task, with various factors to consider, including how much of your doorstep you want to see or whether you’re prepared to pay for a subscription. To help make the decision a little bit easier, I tested eight popular video doorbells to find the best.

Best overall video doorbell:
Google Nest Doorbell (battery)
_{GBP139 at Amazon}

Best budget video doorbell:
Blink smart video doorbell with Sync Module 2
_{GBP60 at AO}

Best subscription-free video doorbell:
Eufy video doorbell E340
_{GBP124 at John Lewis}

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Wikimedia Foundation seeks judicial review of some requirements of Online Safety Act it claims may endanger safety of volunteer editors

The charity that hosts Wikipedia is challenging the UK’s online safety legislation in the high court, saying some of its regulations would expose the site to “manipulation and vandalism”.

In what could be the first judicial review related to the Online Safety Act, Wikimedia Foundation claims it is at risk of being subjected to the act’s toughest category 1 duties, which impose additional requirements on the biggest sites and apps.

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The newest trailer indicates Grand Theft Auto VI may have a soft centre, with its focus on outlaw lovers Lucia and Jason

Something new is coming to the Grand Theft Auto universe next year. I don’t mean super-high-definition visuals, or previously unexplored areas of Rockstar’s take on the US. This time it’s something much more profound. If you’ve seen the newly released second trailer from GTA6 – somewhat cruelly released just days after we discovered the game won’t be out until next May – then you might know what I mean. The brand new thing is romance.

It’s now clear that the key protagonists of the latest gangland adventure are Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, two twentysomething lovers from the wrong side of the tracks. He’s ex-army, now working for drug runners; she’s fresh out of jail, looking to make a better life for herself and her beloved mom. They fall for each other, hatch a plan to get out of Vice City, and then when their simple heist goes wrong, they find themselves at the sharp end of a state-wide conspiracy. You always knew that if Rockstar were going to tell a love story, it would involve a formidable cast of underworld kingpins, gang members, conspiracy nuts and corrupt politicians, and you were right.

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President Trump’s tariffs have plunged the world economy into chaos. But history counsels against despair – and the left should seize on capitalism’s crisis of legitimacy

Since Donald Trump launched his chaotic trade war earlier this year, it has become a truism to say he has plunged the world economy into crisis. At last month’s spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, where policymakers and finance ministers from all over congregated, the attenders were “shellshocked”, the economist Eswar Prasad, a former senior IMF official who now teaches at Cornell, told me. “The sense is that the world has changed fundamentally in ways that cannot easily be put back together. Every country has to figure out its own place in this new world order and how to protect its own interests.”

Trump’s assault on the old global order is real. But in taking its measure, it’s necessary to look beyond the daily headlines and acknowledge that being in a state of crisis is nothing new to capitalism. It’s also important to note that, as Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” Even would-be authoritarians who occupy the Oval Office have to operate in the social, economic and political environment that is bequeathed to them. In Trump’s case, the inheritance was one in which global capitalism was already suffering from a crisis of legitimacy.

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They are mocked by gen Z for everything from their trainer socks to their mom jeans and selfie technique. A maligned millennial asks: how did we get here?

Her right to a naked ankle is, in the end, the hill Natalie Ormond is willing to die on. Ormond, a millennial, simply cannot – will not – get her head around gen Z’s fondness for a crew sock, pulled up over gym leggings or skimming bare legs, brazenly extending over the ankle towards the lower calf. “I stand by trainer socks and I won’t budge,” says the 43-year-old. “The more invisible the sock, the better.”

A proclivity for socks hidden within low-top trainers is just one reason why millennials – anyone born between 1981-1996 – are now considered achingly uncool by the generation that came next: gen Z, AKA the zoomers, or zillennials. According to countless TikTok videos, other sources of derision for the generation that first popularised social media, millennial pink, and pumpkin-spice lattes are their choice of jeans (skinny and mom jeans are out; baggy hipsters are in); an obsession with avocado on toast (gen Z’s green grub of choice is matcha); their excessive use of the crying laughing face emoji (for a zoomer, the skull emoji indicates humour, representing phrases such as “I’m dying with laughter”); and the “millennial pause”, a brief moment of silence at the start of a millennial’s video or voice note, thought to be because – and this really does make them sound ancient – they like to check the device they’re using is actually recording. Millennials, typically self-deprecating, tend to join in, poking fun at themselves under the hashtags like #millennialsoftiktok.

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Vulcan device ‘capable of grabbing three-quarters of items in warehouses’ fuels fears of mass job losses

Amazon said it has made a “fundamental leap forward in robotics” after developing a robot with a sense of touch that will be capable of grabbing about three-quarters of the items in its vast warehouses.

Vulcan – which launches at the US firm’s “Delivering the Future” event in Dortmund, Germany, on Wednesday and is to be deployed around the world in the next few years – is designed to help humans sort items for storage and then prepare them for delivery as the latest in a suite of robots which have an ever-growing role in the online retailer’s extensive operation.

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It’s a year since teachers in St Albans asked parents not to give younger children smartphones. How successful have they been? What do the kids think about it? And has it made the adults think about their own ‘addiction’?

At 3.12pm on a sunny spring afternoon in St Albans, Yasser Afghen reaches for the iPhone in his jeans pocket, hoping to use the three minutes before his son emerges from his year 1 primary class to scroll through his emails. As he lifts the phone to his face, Matthew Tavender, the head teacher of Cunningham Hill school, strides across the playground towards him. Afghen smiles apologetically, puts his phone away, and spends the remaining waiting time listening to the birdsong in the trees behind the school yard.

A one-storey 1960s block with 14 classrooms backing on to a playing field, Cunningham Hill primary feels like an unlikely hub for a revolution. But a year ago, Tavender and the school’s executive head, Justine Elbourne-Cload, began coordinating with the heads at other primary schools across the city, then sent a joint letter to parents and carers across St Albans: the highly addictive nature of smartphones was having a lasting effect on children’s brains. The devices were robbing children of their childhood. Could parents, the letter asked, please avoid giving them smartphones until they turned 14?

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Arcade Crew/Sleepy Mill Studio; PC
Build a card deck of landscape features; organise your territory on a Tetris-like playfield; battle enemies and bosses to progress. It might sound complicated, but this is an ingenious experiment in game design by combination

The indie video game scene is currently dominated by two unassailable genre titans: the rogue-like and the deck-builder. The first is a type of action adventure in which players explore procedurally generated landscapes, where they battle enemies, level up and then die – whereupon they start all over again from scratch. The latter is about building decks of collectible cards (think Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering, but digital) and fighting with them. Titles that combine both in interesting ways – such as Balatro and Slay the Spire – can become huge crossover hits. But the market is getting saturated and so developers are having to find new genres to mix into this potent game design cocktail.

Hence Drop Duchy, a game that attempts to combine the rogue-like deck-builder with … Tetris. Yes, the action takes place on a playfield in which differently shaped objects drop from the top of the screen to the bottom – except here, each object is either a landscape-type or a building, and the player isn’t only trying to create unbroken lines, they’re trying to place these units effectively to generate resources. Place a farm near a grassy plain block, for example, and it will produce wheat. Put a wooden fortress near a forest and it will generate farmland and swordsmen. When you complete a line, it doesn’t disappear: instead, it multiplies the resources you’re gathering. Why do you need the aforementioned soldiers? Well, alongside placing your own military bases, you also have to find space for random enemy bases, too, and at the end of the round, when all the blocks have been placed, you enter a combat sequence in which you align your military units to take on your foe.

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Much anticipated title was due in autumn but fans will now have to wait another year after the announcement by Rockstar Games

Rockstar Games has delayed the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI until 26 May, 2026. The game had been scheduled for release this autumn, but the lack of a definite date was beginning to raise concerns within the industry.

Announcing the decision via a brief post on its website, the company said: “We are very sorry that this is later than you expected. The interest and excitement surrounding a new Grand Theft Auto has been truly humbling for our entire team. We want to thank you for your support and your patience as we work to finish the game.

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Their tech may have been primitive, but for 80s schoolchildren of a certain kind they had a glamour to equal any modern iPhone

Over the last couple of weeks I have been tidying our attic, and while the general aim has been to prevent its contents from collapsing through the ceiling, I have a side-mission. My most valued possession when I was twelve was a Casio GD-8 Car Race watch – a digital timepiece that included a built-in racing game on its tiny monochrome LCD display. Two big buttons on the front let you steer left and right to avoid incoming vehicles and your aim was to stay alive as long as possible. I lost count of the number of times it was confiscated by teachers at my school. I used to lend it to the hardest boys in the year, thereby guaranteeing me protection against bullies. As a socially inept nerd, this was invaluable to my survival. I’m pretty sure I still have the watch somewhere, and my determination to find it has been augmented by a recent discovery: these things are valuable now.

Casio started making digital watches in the mid-1970s, using technology it had developed in the calculator market to compete on price, but as the decade drew to a close, the market became saturated and the company started to explore new ways to entice buyers. Speaking to Polygon in 2015, Yuichi Masuda, senior executive managing officer and Casio board member, explained, “Casio went back to its original thinking when it first entered the watch market; that is, ‘a watch is not a mere tool to tell the time.’ We started talking about a multifunction [approach], time display plus other things, such as telephone number memory and music alarms.”

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Sony also raised PlayStation 5 price and Nintendo delayed Switch 2 pre-orders as Trump tariffs throw electronics manufacturing into chaos

Microsoft announced on Thursday that it will increase Xbox console prices worldwide, citing “market conditions” just days after Sony made a similar move with its PlayStation 5.

The tech giant also plans to raise prices for some new games developed by its video game subsidiaries.

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Latest satellite-free Sky TV is ready for primetime with better picture, sound and much-improved service

The latest version of Sky’s Glass smart TV is faster and looks better than its predecessor and offers a level of all-in-one convenience that makes the satellite-free pay TV one of the best on the market.

Sky Glass gen 2 is a straight replacement for the original model from 2021, which introduced Sky’s TV-over-broadband service that ditched the need for a satellite dish. The new TV comes in three sizes and you can buy the smallest 43in version for a one-off payment of GBP699 or GBP14 a month spread over four years, after which you own it.

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When Bethesda surprise-released a remake last week, I revisited its world with my son to see if the magic was still there

For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.

I bet a lot of you will have had a similar experience with a Bethesda game – if not Oblivion, then Skyrim or perhaps Fallout 3. There’s something intoxicating about these role-playing games, the way they lay out their worlds for you like a buffet, inviting you to gorge. Go where you like! Learn some weird spells and try them out on bandits! Nip into a cave to fight a necromancer and end up getting ambushed by vampires! Open-world games such as this are exhaustingly common now but Oblivion was the first one I ever played. Lately I’ve been devouring it all again, after Bethesda surprise-released a remake last Friday.

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New iPad has laptop-level power, reliable battery life, great video call camera and a choice of screen sizes

Apple’s iPad Air continues to be the premium tablet to beat, with the latest version featuring a chip upgrade to keep it ahead of the pack.

The new iPad Air M3 costs from GBP599 (€699/$599/A$999) – the same as its predecessor – and comes in two sizes with either an 11in or 13in screen. It sits between the base-model GBP329 iPad A16 and the GBP999 iPad Pro M4, splitting the difference in price and features.

Screen: 11in or 13in Liquid Retina display (264ppi)

Processor: Apple M3 (9-core GPU)

RAM: 8GB

Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB

Operating system: iPadOS 18.4

Camera: 12MP rear, 12MP centre stage

Connectivity: Wifi 6E (5G optional eSim-only), Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C, Touch ID, Smart Connecter

Dimensions: 247.6 x 178.5 x 6.1mm or 280.6 x 214.9 x 6.1mm

Weight: 460g or 616g

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Class-leading camera, top-tier chip, very long battery life, AI and quality software dominate mid-range rivals

Google’s latest cut-price Pixel offers the best bang for your buck in Android phones and is arguably better in many areas than some models costing twice the price.

The Pixel 9a starts at the same GBP499 (€549/$499/A$849) as last year’s equally good value model. That makes it GBP300 or so less than Google’s regular Pixel 9 and places it up against mid-rangers such as Nothing’s Phone 3a Pro and Samsung’s Galaxy A56.

Screen: 6.3in 120Hz FHD+ OLED (422ppi)

Processor: Google Tensor G4

RAM: 8GB

Storage: 128 or 256GB

Operating system: Android 15

Camera: 48MP + 13MP ultrawide, 13MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, Sim/eSim, wifi 6E, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (1m for 30 minutes)

Dimensions: 154.7 x 73.3 x 8.9mm

Weight: 185.9g

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Chip, memory and webcam upgrades are joined by welcome price cut for the top premium notebook

Apple’s much-loved MacBook Air gets even more power, a much better webcam and an unexpected price cut for 2025, making one of the very best consumer laptops even more tempting.

The company’s thinnest and lightest laptop currently starts at GBP999 (€1,199/$999/A$1,699) – GBP100 less than last year’s model – and has Apple’s top M4 chip with a minimum of 16GB of memory, making the cheapest model much more capable.

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With launch problems fixed, first colour Kindle improves reading experience – but it is pricey and too small for comics

Amazon’s first Kindle with a colour screen had been a very long time coming and then suffered a rough landing last year, plagued with yellowing screen issues and shipping delays. But with those problems fixed, is a splash of colour the revolution the Kindle needs?

Amazon isn’t the first to use a colour e-ink screen in an e-reader, but it thinks its upgrades meaningfully improve on the tech used by others such as Boox and Kobo over the past four years by offering greater contrast and speed.

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Transparent back, flashing LEDs, novel design, long battery life and huge triple camera help this Android stand out

London-based Nothing has brought one of the last things setting top-level phones apart from cheaper mid-range models down to a more affordable price: high-quality camera zoom.

Cameras have long been the battleground of the most expensive phones, each vying for better quality, longer reach and multiple lenses. While much of this costly progress has trickled down to cheaper models, optical zoom cameras are few and far between below the GBP600 mark.

Screen: 6.77in 120Hz FHD+ OLED (387ppi)

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3

RAM: 12GB

Storage: 256GB

Operating system: Nothing OS 3.1 (Android 15)

Camera: 50MP main, 50MP 3x tele and 8MP ultrawide, 50MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5.4 and GNSS

Water resistance: IP64 (spray resistant)

Dimensions: 163.5 x 77.5 x 8.4mm

Weight: 211g

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Stripped back iPhone offers latest chips, AI and longer battery life, but with only a single camera on the back

Apple’s cheapest new smartphone is the iPhone 16e, which offers the basic modern iPhone experience including the latest chips and AI features but for a little less than its other models.

The iPhone 16e costs GBP599 (€699/$599/A$999) and is the spiritual successor to the iPhone SE line. Where the iPhone SE still had the old-school chunky design with home button, the 16e has the body of the iPhone 14 with the chips of the GBP799 iPhone 16.

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Compact phone has flagship chip and buckets of AI, but hasn’t changed much from predecessors

The smallest and cheapest of Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 line might be the one to buy, offering top performance and the very latest AI features for less and proving that smaller-sized Androids can still be great.

Unlike previous generations of Samsung’s smaller models sold in the UK and Europe, the regular S25 has the same top-flight chip as the enormous and pricey Ultra model, offering a lot of performance while costing GBP799 (€919/$800/A$1,399).

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