Business & Tech
The latest stories from independent business & tech media.
Developer given Mission:Impossible - fixing rubbish code that could crash a city - simply chose not to accept it
After imagining explosions, blackouts, and daring escapes, this techie decided the best thing to do was just not doing the job
HMRC tax receipts hit £322.7bn as advisers warn of IHT and CGT traps
HMRC collected £322.7bn in total tax and national insurance contributions between April and July 2026, marking a £19.1bn increase on the same four-month period last year.
Greg Neall: Inventive tax thinking – what would you change?
With the new prime minister moving in, there was some talk of tax changes, such as scrapping stamp duty and council tax in favour of a land tax. It got me thinking about what other changes could we go for in an ideal world, and
Researcher tricks Apple’s Find My into sharing location data with Linux
Clever protocol wrangling gets iBiz-only people tracking working on a non-iGadget
Alibaba Cloud plans to use fewer Western chips, to boost its already huge AI margins
Cloudy AI is Chinese giant’s ‘most certain’ path to growth as e-commerce slows
Supermicro fired staff after probe into $2.5 billion GPUs-to-China smuggling operation
Fashion tech founder jailed for five years over $300m investor fraud
The founder of fashion rental technology business CaaStle has been sentenced to five years in prison after admitting to orchestrating a $300m (£223m) fraud that deceived hundreds of investors.
Russian snoops add OAuth abuse to targeted phishing campaigns
Don't click on that State Department meeting invite
Runtime: Open season for AI routing; How TFMs tackle structured data; GitHub DDoS'd itself
+ OpenAI says it has improved its model training security, and why HappyRobot trained its own voice models.
Google tethers Antigravity to enterprise controls amid AI shakeup
Corporate customers can look forward to easier management of agents in Google Cloud
The Morning Briefing: HMRC tax receipts hit £322.7bn as advisers warn of IHT and CGT traps
Good morning and welcome to your Morning Briefing for Friday 21 August 2026. To get this in your inbox every morning
OpenAI chases Anthropic's biz customers with zero data retention pledge
With Private Safety Processing, AI biz promises discreet, automated prompt surveillance
Waymo has designed a robocar chip to stay ahead of Tesla
5 nm ML accelerators promise 1,000+ TOPS, ultra-low latency
Boohoo hit with £2m fine in France over ‘fake’ discounts
Boohoo has been slapped with a £2m fine in France after the country’s consumer watchdog found the fashion retailer had misled shoppers with discounts that were not always genuine.
Alibaba profit plunges 75% as AI spending increases
Alibaba has posted a 75 per cent drop in quarterly profits as it ramped up spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. The group recorded a nine per cent rise in revenue to 268.95bn yuan (£29.6bn) for the April-to-June quarter, narrowly ahead of analyst expectations of…
Retail sales slip 0.5% as heatwave hits fashion demand
UK retail sales fell 0.5 per cent in July as the prolonged heatwave and an earlier start to summer promotions impacted fashion and non-food spending.
Amazon to take drone delivery to 500 US towns and cities, when will the UK follow?
Amazon is dramatically ramping up its drone delivery operation in the US, with plans to bring Prime Air to nearly 500 towns and cities by the end of the year. But UK shoppers may have to wait longer for a rollout on anything approaching the same scale.
Tash Whitmey on how Tesco is becoming a “media owner with soul”
Tesco is the UK’s largest supermarket, with over 24 million Clubcard users. It makes sense then that they opened their own retail media network – Tesco Media. Tesco Media was designed to help brands and agencies grow and connect.
Cisco bug severity warning reads like Olympic gymnastics scores: 10, 10, 9.9, 9.6, and 7.5.
Secure Workload Software has five nasty flaws and even SaaS users have updates to install
Microsoft gives Task Manager another task: Watching AI workloads
Per-process NPU metrics arrive as one more venerable Windows utility risks feature bloat
US claims 15 of the world's top 20 hyperscale datacenter locations
Northern Virginia alone accounts for nearly 12% of global capacity, though new builds are shifting inland
Slack Code taps into collective vibe, puts AI agents into the group chat
Developers can now invite the whole team along for their quality time with the coding bot
Thunderbird to flap twice as fast from September
Email client follows Firefox onto two-week release treadmill
Ransomware crook poses as recovery firm to steal payments from fellow extortionists
Because apparently even ransomware gangs can't trust the people they do business with
Global banks sign for Ant International AI forecasting model
A host of banking giants, including Barclays and Deutsche Bank, are already using a new Ant International AI model to improve their cashflow forecasting and FX liquidity management capabilities.
Visa partners _able and Onafriq to expand credit access in Africa
Visa is working with credit infrastructure provider _able and African payments outfit Onafriq to expand access to credit to millions of African bank account holders.
US Bank investigates LockBit's claims as ransomware crims set pay-or-leak deadline
Experian lets Brits check credit score within ChatGPT
Experian has upgraded its ChatGPT app to let Brits see their credit score within the AI platform.
