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Strict age limit enforcement is expanding globally and it is gradually becoming part of operating systems. Apple began requiring age verification from all iPhone users in Britain earlier this year, and the practice has now expanded to two new countries: Singapore and South Korea.

The age must be genuinely verified, meaning simply faking the birth date is not enough - nor is the good old adult entertainment sites' "are you an adult?" query.

In Britain, a nationwide digital method to verify age is not widely used yet, the age can be verified in several different ways. If an Apple user account has existed for at least 18 years, no special tricks are needed when setting up a new iPhone.

But if the user account is not old enough, user's age must be proven by other means. These methods include entering a credit card issued in Britain during phone setup (a minor cannot obtain a credit card acting as a 'main card' in Britain) or some method of age verification according to the recently introduced PASS scheme. The last option offered is scanning and sending a passport or driving license to Apple for verification.

A much-desired update is coming to Steam, the world's largest PC game marketplace, owned by Valve.

Steam will start showing an estimate of how well each game would perform on the specific computer you are logged into the Steam marketplace with.

The estimate is based on real performance statistics from other users who have already played the game, and the computer configurations used by those players. In other words: you will directly see how fast the game runs on your own computer, because it is very likely that someone has already played the game with exactly the same hardware you are using.

According to Steam's latest change history, the collected game performance data is anonymized, meaning no individual player can be identified from it. Smoothness is simply described by the fps number, which indicates how many times per second the computer in use can update the image displayed on the screen with that particular game.

The feature is currently in beta testing and focuses on players using the SteamOS operating system.

Microsoft has recently given strong hints that Windows 11's problems and pain points are finally being seriously addressed.

As one clear step, Microsoft has established a completely new team, which focuses on renewing a large number of key Windows core applications - and they are intended to be implemented entirely as native applications. This refers to the fact that nowadays - in both Windows and most other operating systems - a large portion of applications are implemented as so-called PWA applications, meaning, to put it very simply, they are solutions built with web technologies, wrapped as apps.

The advantage of native applications over PWA applications is that they demand much less PC resources like RAM, and partly also better consistency in the user interface's appearance and usability. Apple has also been criticized for the fact that an increasing number of Mac's core applications are implemented using (usually Electron) PWA technology.

The team will be led by a name perhaps vaguely familiar to many tech enthusiasts, Rudy Huyn. Huyn rose to fame during the Windows Phone era, when the biggest problem with Windows phones was the lack of many important applications. App giants were not interested in developing new versions of their apps for Windows Phone, so Huyn - usually without permission - made them himself. His creations on Windows Phone included an unofficial Tinder app for Windows Phone and an unofficial Windows Phone version of Secret.

Google's popular photo service, Google Photos, is finally coming directly to Samsung TVs.

Photos integrates directly into Samsung TV's entire user interface, meaning it's not just another app. At the same time, Google Photos replaces Microsoft's OneDrive integration, which was previously on Samsung TVs and will now be removed from Samsung TVs.

Just like on a mobile phone, Google Photos also offers Memories highlights of old photos and moments through the TV. Users can browse their automatically updated memories, view them full-screen, or see selections in a widget view. Freely browsing the entire photo library is not yet possible; the emphasis is on Google's automatically selected highlights.

The installation process has been made easy: in the Google Photos section of the TV, the user is shown a QR code, which is then scanned with a phone camera - and immediately linked to the user's Google account. After this, the user enters a verification code and allows access to their photos. Individual people, pets, or dates can be hidden from memories if, for example, one does not want former partners to appear on the TV's home screen at regular intervals.

In Italy, a court has issued a decision that could have huge implications for streaming services across Europe.

According to the court's decision (in Italian), Netflix's price increases in Italy between 2017 and 2024 were illegal, as they were not justified in any way.

According to the court, price increases made without any specified and explained reason are illegal, as they violate Italian consumer protection law. Netflix does not define any specific reason in its terms of service on the basis of which it can raise prices, but rather generally reserves the right to increase its prices in its terms of service. According to the court, this is not permissible; instead, the reasons for price increases must be clearly stated in the contract - for example, by describing that they are based on inflation or a similar, understandable reason.

Behind the decision is a lawsuit filed by the Italian consumer organization Movimento Consumatori, which demanded the annulment of Netflix's price increases and compensation for customers. The court ordered that the company must refund customers for unduly collected fees, the amount of which can in individual cases reach up to 500 euros for Premium subscribers and approximately 250 euros for Standard subscribers. The refunds apply to both current and former customers who have paid increased prices during the period in question.

Penguin Random House has filed a lawsuit against AI company OpenAI, alleging that the company's ChatGPT has infringed the company's copyrights by reproducing content from a popular German children's book series.

According to The Guardian, the lawsuit was filed in Germany last week and targets OpenAI's Irish European subsidiary.

According to Penguin Random House, ChatGPT, with user prompts, is capable of generating stories, images, and even cover designs that are almost indistinguishable from the original works of the German children's author Ingo Siegner's Coconut, the Little Dragon (in German Der kleine Drache Kokosnuss) book series. The publisher states that ChatGPT was also able to copy the texts from the back covers of the books - and when asked, provided instructions on how to make money from copies of Siegner's books produced by ChatGPT, by publishing them on various self-publishing platforms. According to Penguin Random House, OpenAI has used the works of the author it represents (Siegner) as training material without permission.

Swiss-based Proton, known for strong encryption and privacy protection, has expanded its product range.

The company is now challenging the dominance of Microsoft Teams with its new Proton Meet video conferencing service. As with Proton Mail, Proton Meet is also promised to be end-to-end encrypted (end-to-end encryption) and that no meeting data will be collected by Proton.

Proton Meet meetings can be joined without a Proton user account, and conferences work not only with a separate application but also in a browser and on mobile.

Using Proton Meet is free, as long as meetings last a maximum of one hour and there are a maximum of 50 participants. Larger numbers require a paid Proton subscription from the organizer.

The product launch is clearly timed at the right moment, when Europe is actively considering breaking its dependency on American technology. Often, the transition is easiest to make one piece, product, and service at a time.

The Proton Meet service can be found at meet.proton.me.

American IT giant Oracle has laid off up to 30,000 of its employees around the world in a rather brutal manner.

In countries where advance notice of dismissals is not required, the company simply sent an email at six in the morning to all employees being laid off, informing them of their termination.

The sender of the messages was only "Oracle Leadership", meaning Oracle's management, without the name of any single leader. According to news sources, the company did not inform even the supervisors or HR of those being laid off about the upcoming terminations, meaning they came as a complete surprise before morning coffee on Tuesday, March 31, 2026.

According to the Times of India, the majority of the layoffs affected the United States and India.

Those being laid off were apparently offered a severance package, but on the condition that the employee immediately signs an agreement accepting their termination.

Samsung has announced it will raise the prices of some of its high-end smartphone models in its home market, South Korea.

The price increase particularly affects the foldable display models released last year, the Galaxy Z Fold7, Galaxy Z Flip7, and the thin S25 Edge.

According to Korean sources, the new prices will take effect from April 1, 2026, and primarily target versions with larger storage capacities: for 512-gigabyte models, the price increase is approximately 100,000 Korean won (about €60 / $65), and for 1-terabyte models, it is up to 200,000 won (about €120/$130).

Typically, smartphone prices gradually decrease after their market launch to maintain demand. However, the staggering rise in prices for memory chips and storage, which began last autumn, has quite irreversibly changed the market.

Anthropic's hugely popular AI-powered coding tool, Claude Code, has had its entire source code leaked online via a source map file (source map) published in the npm registry.

The leak was discovered on March 31, 2026, when security researcher Chaofan Shou noticed (link leads to X/Twitter) that a large .map file had been accidentally included in Claude Code's npm package, which allowed anyone to restore the original, TypeScript-based source code of Claude Code. Source map files are intended for developers' debugging, but in this case, their careless publication led to over 1,900 files and over 512,000 lines of code becoming publicly available.

The leaked source code was quickly archived in a public GitHub repository, where it garnered thousands of stars and forks in just a few hours. The developer community reacted immediately to the incident: the event is considered one of the most significant AI software source code leaks in recent years. Many industry experts have called the leak a "treasure trove," as it opens an unprecedented view into the architecture and development of a production-grade AI tool.

Microsoft's GitHub, the world's largest code repository for software development projects, will start using its users' program codes as training material for its own AI.

The change begins on April 24, 2026, and it does not apply to regular GitHub usage, but only to those users who also use GitHub's own GitHub Copilot.

After the change, all conversations had with Copilot, prompts, and code generated by Copilot will be taken as part of Copilot's AI training material. According to Microsoft's statement, the change will significantly improve the quality of code generated by GitHub Copilot, as it will henceforth be based on real life and conversations developers have already had with the AI.

What makes the change unfortunate is that it is a so-called opt-out solution: all GitHub Copilot users are automatically subject to the new policy, unless they themselves refuse to share their activities as AI training material.

The explosive growth in the prices of memory chips and components, which began in autumn 2025, is gradually extending to new product categories.

Now, Japanese Sony has announced (in Japanese) that it is suspending the sale of memory cards for the time being.

According to the company, the background is supply difficulties, meaning Sony is unable to acquire enough NAND memory chips, which are used as storage media in SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives.

Data centers rapidly being built around the world for the needs of AI companies are consuming almost the entire market for both operating memory (RAM) and NAND memory - and in consumer products, the situation is reflected in both rising prices and availability problems.

Sony's announcement of the sales suspension concerns both SD and CFexpress memory cards.

Already yesterday, Sony announced another change, which is also linked to the explosive growth in component prices:

Austria has announced its plan to introduce a legislative change that would prohibit the use of social media by children under 14 years of age.

Austria's initiative is part of a widespread populist trend where several countries are considering restricting children's online use to protect young people from the harmful effects of social media. According to BBC information, the Austrian government has already held extensive negotiations on the matter, but details regarding the implementation and timeline of the law have not yet been confirmed. According to the government, the framework of the legislative initiative could be ready as early as June 2026, after which it would move to a more detailed evaluation process.

The first country to categorically ban all social media services for minors is Australia, where social media was banned for under 16s just before the start of Australian schoolchildren's summer holidays, in December 2025. Similar restrictions have either come into force or are planned elsewhere to some extent: in France, the age limit for social media services is 15 years, and Spain and Ireland are working on restrictions for under 15s.

Several serious security vulnerabilities have been found in many routers from the hugely popular Chinese company TP-Link.

The vulnerabilities have been found in these models, widely used even in Finland:

• TP-Link Archer NX200
• TP-Link Archer NX210
• TP-Link Archer NX500
• TP-Link Archer NX600

The most serious of the discovered vulnerabilities is CVE-2025-15517, which allows for the hijacking of router control without any user interaction. The vulnerability has a risk level of 8.6/10 and is related to a bug in the router's browser-based management panel, which uses an http connection, allowing login to be bypassed and access to the router's administration views.

Other discovered vulnerabilities also have a risk level of 8.5/10: CVE-2025-15518, CVE-2025-15519, and CVE-2025-15605.

The company has released an update for all of these, in the form of new firmware. Unfortunately, routers typically do not update themselves, so every router owner should handle the update manually.

Google has published a new, significantly faster - and more worrysome - timeline for the so-called encryption apocalypse. According to the company, current forms of encryption technologies will become insecure as early as 2029.

This is the so-called Q-Day (quantum day), described as the moment when the computational power of quantum computers reaches a level where public-key encryption algorithms (such as RSA) and elliptic curve-based encryption algorithms can be broken.

Previously, encryption professionals estimated that the moment would not arrive until the 2040s, but now Google estimates that this moment will arrive in just a few years. According to Google, the faster timeline is due to the rapid development of quantum computing hardware recently, and also the swift progress in solving quantum computing-related problems, such as error correction.

The situation is serious, as hostile states and criminals have very likely been collecting encrypted communications, messages, emails, and encrypted documents for years. They are just waiting in some corner of a hard drive for the moment when quantum computing reaches that dreaded "encryption apocalypse" - and then all previously collected secrets can be opened quite easily. This practice is called the Harvest now, Decrypt later method in cybersecurity circles.