‘Stooky Bill’ : 02 October 2025 In days gone by, a Scottish person with a broken appendage might well have said their arm or leg was held in a ‘stooky’ (or ‘stookie’) which meant a plaster-cast. It’s thought the word comes from ‘stucco’ (plaster) although the term also has a derogatory meaning for a ‘stupid person’, so perhaps it’s…
A severe browser security flaw, tacked as CVE-2023-4863 and then CVE-2023-5129, has led to emergency updates in Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Apple’s Safari browsers.The vulnerability, in the libwebp image format, which was made by Google to provide better image compression than e.g., JPEG or PNG, leaves any program using it, such as browsers, vulnerable to attack.The…
If you’ve found a specific passage of text in a web page that you’d like to show to another person, Google Chrome has a built-in feature that allows you to share a link that goes straight to that text. Here’s how it works: – In Chrome, highlight the passage text in any web page that you’d like to show…
Google has announced that it is embedding its ‘Bard’ chatbot into its apps and services with the launch of ‘Bard Extensions’. Bard In a similar way to Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s own ‘Duet’ (for Google Cloud users), and Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot, Google is giving users an embedded chatbot assistant that works across its apps to leverage them and improve productivity. …
In this insight, we look at the introduction of the Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023 (ETDA), what it means and why it’s so significant, plus its implications. The ETDA The Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023 (ETDA), which was based on a draft Bill published by the Law Commission in March 2022, came into force in UK law on 20…
Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink has announced that it’s looking for recruits for its first in-human clinical trial of a brain implant. Approved Neuralink says that it has received approval from the independent institutional review board and for its first hospital site to begin recruitment in its first-in-human clinical trial of a brain implant that could help people with paralysis to control…
It’s been reported that a trade group for U.S. authors (including John Grisham) has sued OpenAI, accusing it of unlawfully training its chatbot ChatGPT on their work. Which Authors? The Authors Guild trade group has filed the lawsuit (in Manhattan federal court) on behalf of a number of prominent authors including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult,…
With many of the world’s coral reefs being damaged by heat and acidification, one startup has developed a system to restore reefs at scale with the help of trained AI robots.. Coral Reefs Struggling The world’s coral reefs only cover 0.2 per cent of the seafloor, but they provide a vital habitat to more than a quarter of marine…
Falcon 1 Launched : 28th September 2008 Rocket Man! This week on September 28 2008 SpaceX managed to finally get the Falcon 1 rocket into space. Founder Elon Musk was obviously thrilled, although curiously he wasn’t hungry – even though he’d skipped breakfast earlier that day. It was because he’d had such a big launch. And just like that…
It’s been reported that according to a dark web victim blog of cybercrime hacking gang ‘Donut,’ Nottingham-based IT Service Provider Agilitas may have been the subject of a ransomware attack.Donut is reported to be claiming that it is in possession of the source code and SQL databases belonging to Agilitas and is threatening to start posting the information onto…
