News written by Petteri Pyyny (August, 2026)

Google has acquired all documents from the bankrupt American airline Spirit Airlines.

And the emphasis is on the word "all", as the deal includes the company's internal documents, spreadsheet files, email messages, and even Teams messages.

The seller was Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy estate, which auctioned off the data mass accumulated by Spirit Airlines over decades. There were several bidders in the auction, and Google's offer of 10 million dollars was ultimately the highest bid according to court records (PDF).

According to a statement given to CNN, Google plans to use the acquired data "to improve its products and develop its AI models". The second highest bid came from a company that also intended to use the data for developing its own AI models.

According to information submitted to the court, all personal and individually identifying data will be removed from the delivered information, meaning they do not violate anyone's privacy under US law.

SpaceX has completed the acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, one of the largest technology deals in recent months. The deal is valued at $60 billion and will be paid in new SpaceX shares. The arrangement concerns Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, and was finalized on Friday, August 14, well before the previously announced third-quarter deadline.

The corporate arrangement was prepared in several stages. Already in April, SpaceX signed an agreement with Anysphere, which gave SpaceX two options: either acquire the company for $60 billion during the current year or pay $10 billion for collaboration without an acquisition. According to information, the acquisition was not intended to be finalized before SpaceX's stock market listing in early June, to avoid delaying the listing process.

Cursor confirmed in its blog that it is now officially part of SpaceX. The announcement particularly highlighted SpaceX's managed data centers, which SpaceX has recently leased with large contracts to companies such as Anthropic and Google. According to Cursor, the acquisition gives it access to SpaceX's available computing capacity, meaning Cursor will be able to freely use its parent company's data centers in the future.

France's Constitutional Council has overturned a law that would have banned access to social media services for under-15s.

The decision halts - at least for now - a legislative project that would have made France the first European country to restrict minors' social media use so strictly. The law had been approved by the French parliament in July by a clear majority, and was set to come into force on September 1, 2026, but the court deemed it unconstitutional.

The Constitutional Council found (in French) that a general ban disproportionately restricts minors' freedom of speech and communication. The Council did acknowledge in its decision that the state has a constitutional obligation to protect the best interests of children and address the potential harms of social media to young people. However, it simultaneously stated that the legislator had not sufficiently demonstrated that the online services covered by the ban would pose proven risks to the health or safety of minors. The court therefore considered the solution too broad, as it would have applied one and the same rule to a wide variety of platforms categorized as "social media".

Meta-owned, the world's most popular photo-focused social media service Instagram has changed its text-based logo.

The matter was announced by Instagram head Adam Mosseri in his Threads post.

The world's best-known ad-blocking application, uBlock Origin, has had to conclude that the software's development team has met a tougher opponent than itself.

According to the developers, they have decided to definitively give up even trying to block Facebook's ads.

The reason behind the decision is that Facebook constantly changes the technology of its ads when some larger ad-blocking software learns to identify and block them.

Facebook, owned by Meta, is able to do this trickery because the ads displayed in the company's services load directly from Facebook's own servers. The lion's share of regular online services use external parties to display ads, but Meta itself is one of the world's largest ad distributors, so the company can freely tinker with its ad technology.

The developers announced their decision on Reddit, describing Facebook's practices as "disgusting".

The development team has not completely thrown in the towel regarding Facebook's ads either; instead, the team encourages volunteers who are interested in the challenge to participate in the development of uBlock Origin. However, the current developers will no longer spend their time on a cat-and-mouse game with Facebook.

Both the European Union and the state of California now require AI-generated content to be identifiable and clearly labeled as being created by AI.

So this is not merely an "annoying European Union requirement". An essentially identical requirement is also coming into effect in California, the most populous state in the United States.

And AI companies have already said that they are taking steps to comply with these requirements. Images, videos and audio are being given so-called digital watermarks that can be detected programmatically from the file, even though they are not actually visible in the image or video - or audible in the audio.

But what has caused considerably more confusion is the fact that AI companies are also adding digital identifiers to AI-generated text. For example, Anthropic has already stated that all text generated by its Claude AI will contain a digital identifier within the European Union starting August 2, 2026.

In France, a law came into force on August 11, 2026, which prohibits telemarketing and telesales.

According to the French newspaper Le Monde, the law was driven by about a dozen consumer organizations, and at their initiative, the French parliament drafted the legislation that has now come into force.

The law prohibits both companies and individuals from making unauthorized marketing calls. At the same time, the French state launched a website where those violating the law can be reported.

However, there are a couple of exceptions in the law: a consumer can personally give permission for telesales, but permission can only be given to a specific company, which cannot transfer or extend the consent to other companies. An example of such a situation is when a customer requests a quote from a company via its website and, at the same time, ticks their approval for the company to make sales calls to the customer, both in the form of an offer call and in the future.

The second exception concerns situations where the consumer already has an existing customer relationship with the company. For example, a publishing house may market its other magazines to a customer who already subscribes to one of the group's magazines.

YouTube's ad-free, paid version - YouTube Premium - has become a huge hit around the world. But its price tag is too hefty for some potential subscribers - it currently costs more than $20 per month in some countries.

To address this, YouTube introduced a few years ago a kind of lightened version of the full YouTube Premium subscription, called YouTube Premium Lite.

The main difference of Premium Lite compared to the full version is that ads are shown as usual with music videos. Other video content is ad-free (with certain, relatively rare exceptions) for Premium Lite subscribers.

Another significant difference is that the full version of the Premium subscription also includes the YouTube Music Premium music service, which Premium Lite does not include.

Like the full version, YouTube Premium Lite allows you to play videos in the background, even when the phone screen is off - meaning videos can be used as a kind of podcast substitute, as audio only.

Unfortunately, Premium Lite has only been available in a handful of countries: for example, in Europe, most countries don't have it as of now.

According to media reports, Sony is building an in-house team to bring advertising into PlayStation games.

According to DigiDay's information, Sony has actively started recruiting advertising professionals to its PlayStation unit.

Sony's recruitments have specifically targeted ad sales professionals, meaning it is by no means a question of developing Sony's own advertising through recruitments - but rather Sony wants to start selling ad space itself.

The trend is logical in itself, as game budgets have grown significantly in recent years, but at the same time, game companies do not dare to raise game prices too much, fearing a consumer backlash.

So, by bringing advertising into games, Sony hopes to achieve a situation where game sales prices can largely be kept at current levels, but the additional revenue generated from advertising better covers the increased game development costs.

Sony tried to build an in-game advertising platform already during the PlayStation 3 era, but the project was eventually quietly shelved. Other game companies, such as Microsoft and EA, have at least experimented with bringing advertising into games.

Especially among programmers operating on a tighter budget, alongside AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, more affordable, often Chinese, large language models are also popular.

Their popularity is based on their significantly more affordable price - whether the application is actual programming work or software that uses AI itself.

The best known and most popular of these "alternative" AI providers has long been the Chinese DeepSeek.

But now DeepSeek has warned its customers, both in China and abroad, that it intends to raise its prices "significantly" in the near future. The price increase specifically concerns DeepSeek's programming interface (API), which is utilized in both programming and software.

According to the South China Morning Post, this is the company's first significant price increase ever.

Smart glasses have this year, for the first time in the product category's history, truly become products used by even ordinary people.

But as is usually always the case with new and innovative tech, there is always a certain segment of people who are just ruining the fun for everybody.

In other words, the camera technology found in smart glasses has been increasingly used for secretly filming people (usually women), even in people's own homes. This has then led to a situation where a very strong public opinion has quickly risen against smart glasses, specifically criticizing how they destroy the privacy of other people.

Whereas users of first-generation smart glasses were called glassholes in the US in the 2010s - largely for the same reason - with this newer smart glasses trend, the glasses themselves have begun to be called pervert glasses.

Into this rebellious spirit steps the American, privacy-respecting DuckDuckGo, which has released its own sunglasses.

The refreshing idea behind DuckDuckGo's glasses is that they have no smart features at all. They are just ordinary, polarized sunglasses with the company's logo on the temples.

The massive corporate acquisition, announced in September 2025 and approved by shareholders in December, has now been officially completed. Electronic Arts (EA), one of the most well-known companies in the gaming industry, has been acquired by an investor consortium and will be delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange. The total value of the deal was approximately 55 billion dollars, or about 47 billion euros, and shareholders will receive 210 dollars per share in cash for the completed transaction.

Although the buyer is officially an investment consortium comprising private equity firm Silver Lake, Affinity Partners, and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), according to PC Gamer, control of the company will shift to Saudi Arabia. With the deal, the country's investment fund will control a significant 93.4 percent ownership stake in the gaming giant.

Behind Affinity Partners, which acts as a smaller representative of the consortium, is Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, who has pre-existing close financial ties to Saudi Arabia.

The excellence of modern, better robot vacuum cleaners compared to the curse-inducing contraptions of the 2010s largely lies in their ability to avoid all obstacles on the floor, cope with carpets, and generally not require you to clear the apartment at all.

But many are also concerned by the fact that almost all robot vacuum cleaners are Chinese and have cameras. Cameras are, of course, practically mandatory because precisely that excellent, life-easing obstacle avoidance is based on cameras and depth perception.

Concern for privacy is, of course, understandable. In addition, modern robot vacuums rely heavily on cloud services provided by manufacturers - which means that if the manufacturer goes bankrupt, the robot turns into an expensive paperweight. This is what happened when Neato ceased its operations.

Solutions have been developed for these problems, the best known of which is probably Valetudo, an open source alternative operating system for robot vacuum cleaners.

The U.S. communications authority FCC has expanded its list of prohibited devices, maintained in the name of national security, to cover so-called "advanced robotic devices". The decision surprisingly also extends to robot vacuum cleaners, although the agency has not named specific brands or models.

Behind the FCC's decision (PDF) is a concern that networked devices equipped with sensors and mapping technology could pose a new type of cyber and intelligence risk to critical U.S. infrastructure. Previously, the FCC banned all routers manufactured outside the United States, as well as all drones manufactured abroad.

According to the FCC, the networked features of advanced robotic systems create broad vulnerabilities and attack vectors and are capable of collecting real-world data for malicious actors. The agency's updated policy states that reliance on robotic devices manufactured outside the United States could open opportunities for citizen espionage, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or even enable the remote hijacking of robots. The regulation broadly targets autonomous electronic devices with their own sensors and intelligent navigation - this group includes, in addition to robot vacuum cleaners, for example, robotic lawnmowers, delivery robots, and devices used in warehouse logistics.