Downtime

Recent Posts

  • The battle of the poms

    Ryan Priest 17 Mar 2021
  • A Pennsylvania mum has been charged with multiple counts of harassment after reportedly using deepfake technology to oust her daughter’s cheerleading rivals. In a current-day reimagining of Sophie ...

  • Pay-in-three is a slur

    Ryan Priest 11 Mar 2021
  • PayPal is taking its seductive “buy now, pay later” service to Australia, after successful roll-outs in Britain and the US saw it handle more than £540m of transactions by the end of 2020. It’s ...

  • We shan’t forget

    Ryan Priest 04 Mar 2021
  • Online genealogy platform MyHeritage has embraced deep learning with its Deep Nostalgia service, which allows users to crudely animate photos of their long-dead descendants – or, let’s face it, ...

  • World's first computer faced a gnawing dilemma

    Cliff Saran - Managing Editor 24 Feb 2021
  • The ENIAC is 75 years old. This complex piece of kit from the 1940s was the world’s first computer. It was commissioned by the US army to calculate missile trajectories. It was officially launched ...

  • The mystery novel coronavirus

    Ryan Priest 17 Feb 2021
  • Scientists have been using machine learning to pick out the animal kingdom’s prime suspects for the next coronavirus, and we’re sorry to report it spells party over for a number of familiar ...

  • Better call Ron

    Ryan Priest 10 Feb 2021
  • A Texan lawyer has helped the internet through its Handforth Parish Council comedown by donning a sad kitten filter in virtual court. “I believe you have a filter turned on in your video settings,” ...

  • Funkier than a Moskito tweeter

    Ryan Priest 03 Feb 2021
  • The husband and wife who made hundreds of millions selling Bebo to AOL before buying it back for a relative pittance five years later have spent lockdown planning to relaunch the site (again). In a ...

  • Address is a proxy, mate

    Ryan Priest 27 Jan 2021
  • Worldwide VPN downloads reportedly reached 277 million last year, with one reason for the surge being a lockdown-induced appetite to circumvent streaming services’ geo-restrictions. How can anyone ...

  • Levanstoleski

    Ryan Priest 20 Jan 2021
  • One of Donald Trump’s last acts as US president was to pardon Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer who faced 18 months for being caught with his fingers in the intellectual till. Citing ...

  • Doubting Thomas

    Ryan Priest 13 Jan 2021
  • As a rule of thumb, we wish only misery and ruin on Bitcoin investors for daring to make the phenomenon sound any more sophisticated than a Bet365 advert. But our maniacal propensity for ...

  • Talk that talk

    Ryan Priest 06 Jan 2021
  • Brian Clough once said that if he was given a magic wand and wanted to improve the standard of UK life overnight, he would have Rupert Murdoch removed from this planet. For 12 hours on Tuesday 5 ...

  • A Christmas Kard

    Ryan Priest 11 Dec 2020
  • For Christmas, we got you the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime. A special surprise from October 2020. A hologram of Robert Kardashian. Here is the transcript in full: “Happy Christmas, reader. ...

  • Data day job

    Ryan Priest 02 Dec 2020
  • A senior lecturer in management at the University of Exeter has suggested a number of wise-cracking robots have the emotional intelligence required to make them suitable for leadership roles. ...

  • Humerus for a moment

    Ryan Priest 25 Nov 2020
  • This dystopian shambles of a year has reached a new, personal low, after a PR email revealed that a robotics company based in Reading has completed its first successful trial of a VR-controlled ...

  • Vax doesn’t have to be vexing

    Ryan Priest 18 Nov 2020
  • The Labour Party has called for emergency laws to prevent social media companies from playing host to anti-vaccine content. You’d’ve thought the ruling elite would have already got the memo to ...