The Diary of a CEO star builds his empire, while Jackass legend Johnny Knoxville debuts a show celebrating ‘slightly unhinged people’. Plus: five of the best podcasts about motherhood

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Some exciting podcast news before we get stuck into this week’s best new series …

Danny Robins is taking his frightfully popular ghost hunting podcast Uncanny to the US at the end of the month – he covers a potential UFO encounter, visits voodoo shops in New Orleans and meets a woman who believes her father, a former spy, is contacting her from beyond the grave.

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Six ans après son décodeur UHD 4K, l'opérateur Orange vient d'officialiser le « Décodeur TV 6 », qui est destiné à devenir le moyen principal pour accéder à la télévision et au replay dans ses offres.

This is how these bosses get rich: by hiding underpaid, unrecognised human work behind the trappings of technology

In 2021, when Amazon launched its first “just walk out” grocery store in the UK in Ealing, west London, this newspaper reported on the cutting-edge technologies that Amazon said made it all possible: facial-recognition cameras, sensors on the shelves and, of course, “artificial intelligence”. The first customers queued outside, excited to experience the future. “I am an early adopter,” one of them said. “I can’t wait to see how this new technology works and I think it is going to be everywhere shortly.”

The promise of the “just walk out” stores was that customers would not need to queue for a cashier, scan their own items or even pause on the way out. They could simply take what they needed, walk out the door and the benevolent all-seeing eye of technology would seamlessly price their goods, charge their account and send them a receipt.

James Bridle is a writer and artist, and the author of Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

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C'est aussi une manière de s'apercevoir de l'impact de l'éclipse solaire outre-Atlantique. Pendant un moment, le trafic Internet a chuté aux USA, lors du passage de l'ombre de la Lune sur la Terre. Des reculs ont aussi été observés au Mexique et au Canada.

In discovering malicious code that endangered global networks in open-source software, Andres Freund exposed our reliance on insecure, volunteer-maintained tech

On Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into remote computers on the internet, but the interactions with the distant machines were significantly slower than usual. So he did some digging and found malicious code embedded in a software package called XZ Utils that was running on his machine. This is a critical utility for compressing (and decompressing) data running on the Linux operating system, the OS that powers the vast majority of publicly accessible internet servers across the world. Which means that every such machine is running XZ Utils.

Freund’s digging revealed that the malicious code had arrived in his machine via two recent updates to XZ Utils, and he alerted the Open Source Security list to reveal that those updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software. It was what is called a “supply-chain attack” (like the catastrophic SolarWinds one of 2020 ) – where malicious software is not directly injected into targeted machines, but distributed by infecting the regular software updates to which all computer users are wearily accustomed. If you want to get malware out there, infecting the supply chain is the smart way to do it.

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The surveillance specialist was invited to dine with the home secretary after the company he ran gave the party thousands

Christen Ager-Hanssen was in Mallorca conducting an espionage operation when the email from Conservative party headquarters arrived.

“Thank you for indicating you would like to attend our private dinner with Suella Braverman,” a party official wrote to the Norwegian businessman last September. “It promises to be a great evening.”

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Elon Musk’s firm reverses policy of insisting on payment for ‘verified status’ – embarrassing some beneficiaries

Elon Musk has reversed one of his most notorious decisions since taking over X, the social network better known as Twitter, and started bestowing blue ticks on the site’s most-followed users – whether they want them or not.

The entrepreneur and one-time “Chief Twit” had tweeted last week that the service would grant free “premium” status to any user with more than 2,500 “verified subscriber follows” and accounts with more than 5,000 would get “premium+”. That policy is now being enacted.

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Cost of artificial intelligence service could mean leaders in sector turning to subscription models

Google is reportedly drawing up plans to charge for AI-enhanced search features, in what would be the biggest shake up to the company’s revenue model in its history.

The radical shift is a natural consequence of the vast expense required to provide the service, experts say, and would leave every leading player in the sector offering some variety of subscription model to cover its costs.

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Don’t miss Audible’s A-list adaptation of the always relevant 1984, also starring Tom Hardy and Andrew Scott. Plus: five of the most controversial podcasts

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What happens when you get a couple of British telly stars to critique TV for a podcast? One heck of a painfully awkward moment – namely, Joanna Page’s rather uncomfortable takedown of an emerging comedian’s new show, which she called “unbearable”.

If you missed the headlines it created last week, Page and her Off The Telly co-host Natalie Cassidy discussed Lucia Keskin’s BBC Three comedy series, Things I Should Have Done.

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