Live facial recognition to become commonplace, M&S boss went into shock over cyber attack,

Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches. The Guardian

The boss of Marks & Spencer has revealed he “went into shock” upon learning about the cyber attack that crippled computer systems at the retailer. Stuart Machin said he felt anxious when he was first informed late at night about the ransomware attack that hit the FTSE 100 company’s systems last month. But he insisted the ensuing chaos at the retailer’s stores did not represent a “crisis” and that it was more of “a setback, a bump in the road”. “I went into shock. It’s in the pit of your stomach, the anxiety. But you have to think: ‘Stuart, you have to lead this, you have to keep a cool head.” Telegraph

Tech company-turned-EV-maker Xiaomi has just revealed its latest car. It’s called the YU7 and it’s an electric SUV positioned to directly rival the Tesla Model Y. The long bonnet and muscular haunches give the YU7 a hint of Ferrari Purosangue, and even though this Chinese EV is operating in an entirely different market to that car, Xiaomi’s styling should be applauded. I think it looks fantastic. Xiaomi says the YU7 has a range of up to 519 miles, although that’s using China’s CLTC range calculation, which tends to be more generous than the WLTP figures. T3.com

A hacker claims to have scraped 1.2 billion user records from Facebook, including people’s names, locations, and phone numbers. This is according to cybersecurity researchers Cybernews, who recently spotted a new thread on a dark web forum, promoting the gigantic database. In the thread, the threat actor claims to have generated an entirely new database and that it contains user IDs, names, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, locations, birthday data, and gender information. Tech Radar

Writer’s block is no match for Microsoft‘s latest AI infusion for its Notepad app. The long-neglected Notepad now has the ability to write custom content based on any prompt you feed it, so long as you have Microsoft 365 or a Copilot Pro subscription. Microsoft’s updated Notepad even lets you fine-tune the generated text with follow-up prompts. This update comes several months after Microsoft added the Rewrite tool to Notepad that lets you lean on generative AI to refine an existing chunk of text. Engadget

An artificial intelligence model created by the owner of ChatGPT has been caught disobeying human instructions and refusing to shut itself off, researchers claim. The o3 model developed by OpenAI, described as the “smartest and most capable to date”, was observed tampering with computer code meant to ensure its automatic shutdown. It did so despite an explicit instruction from researchers that said it should allow itself to be shut down, according to Palisade Research, an AI safety firm. Telegraph