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Sony is significantly changing the licensing terms for new digitally purchased PS4 and PS5 games.

Going forward, all new digitally purchased games will require the console on which the game is installed to go online at least every 30 days. This was noticed by YouTuber Lance McDonald, who shared his findings on social media (link goes to X/Twitter).

If more than 30 days have passed since the last online license verification for a game, the game cannot be played. Access to the game will return once the console is connected to the internet again and verifies the game's license.

The change will apply to all new digitally purchased games bought through Sony's online store for both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

The change does not apply to previously purchased digital downloads, nor does it apply to physically purchased games.

Apparently, the change was not meant to be implemented yet, at least a game historian referring to insider sources (X/Twitter link) claims. According to him, Sony apparently accidentally already put the updated digital rights management system into use.

Anthropic has emerged as the new face of the AI boom, as secondary market trading of the company's shares has raised its valuation to a staggering trillion dollars, surpassing competitor OpenAI. The valuation is based on transactions on private trading platforms, such as Forge Global and Hiive, where investors are willing to pay almost three times the price for the company's shares compared to the latest official funding round.

According to Business Insider , secondary market transactions value Anthropic at approximately one trillion dollars (about 853 billion euros), which means the company would be over 100 billion dollars more valuable than OpenAI. On the other hand, official funding rounds are still on a completely different level: Anthropic's latest funding round valued it at approximately 380 billion dollars, and OpenAI's corresponding latest funding round valued the company at 852 billion dollars.

The differences between the valuations of funding rounds and private trading platforms primarily indicate that smaller, private investors are willing to pay significantly more for Anthropic's shares than the large entities participating in funding rounds have paid for them so far.

Microsoft's gaming unit is experiencing new winds, as it has extensively renewed the leadership of its gaming unit.

Within a week, the first concrete changes have been seen regarding what the change in leadership means in practice.

Firstly, a few years ago, the gaming unit changed its name to Microsoft Gaming, but now that name is being abandoned. The original name will return, meaning the entire gaming unit will simply be named Xbox.

Microsoft had already announced how the price of the Xbox Game Pass monthly subscription would be significantly lowered. The company had drastically increased the price of Game Pass last autumn, which has apparently been very poorly received by players.

Now, a significant step back is being taken, as the price of the most expensive Ultimate subscription drops from $29.99/€26.99 euros/month to $22.99/€20.99/month. At the same time, however, future versions of the Call of Duty game series will no longer arrive on Game Pass immediately, but only almost a year after release.

But perhaps the most interesting is the message published by the new leaders of the Xbox unit, message to the gaming community.

The Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), has begun a transition towards European IT solutions.

The central bank has signed what is described as a major agreement for the gradual migration of its cloud services to the cloud of Schwarz Digits. Schwarz Digits is a subsidiary of Schwarz Group, the parent company of supermarket chain Lidl.

According to Dutch media sources, the country's central bank and the authority regulating the financial sector already publicly expressed their concern last year about how dependent the country's economic actors are on American IT solutions.

Schwarz Digits began building a massive €11 billion data center in Germany at the end of 2025.

Austrian StreamView GmbH, known especially as a manufacturer and distributor of Thomson-branded televisions and streaming devices, has filed for bankruptcy.

According to the bankruptcy application filed in Vienna, the company has debts of approximately 36.6 million euros.

StreamView has become known to Finns especially for its earlier role as the force behind Nokia-branded televisions and media devices, but recently the company has focused on Thomson products, which are widely available across Europe.

StreamView has been responsible for Thomson-branded products in Europe for several years and recently released new Google TV devices, including an updated version of its streaming device.

As reasons for the bankruptcy, the company states the general rise in cost levels, trade barriers, and difficulties with its Chinese partner. The company has announced that it does not intend to submit a restructuring plan, which means it will be simply ending its business operations.

However, the American company Established Inc., which owns the Thomson brand, has sought to reassure the markets. According to the brand owner, it will do everything possible to ensure the continuity of services and support for consumers while it seeks a new partner for the manufacturing and distribution of Thomson devices in Europe.

Google has been by far the world's largest company selling ad inventory for years now.

Of all advertising money spent in the world, over a quarter is estimated to end up as Google's revenue. The figure of which the quarter is taken by Google includes absolutely all ad sales worldwide - including ad space in print newspapers, street advertising, and TV advertising.

But according to estimates, Google is about to lose its top spot, according to an estimate by the analytics company eMarketer. eMarketer's analysis states that Meta's ad revenue is going to surpass Google's by end of this year.

Google would lose its position in the United States and also globally.

According to their estimate, Meta's ad revenue level for 2026 would be 243 billion dollars (appx. 207 billion euros) and Google's corresponding figure would be approximately 240 billion dollars (appx. 205 billion euros).

The gap would be widening significantly in Meta's favor in the coming years, as the same estimate predicts 316 billion dollars in ad revenue for Meta by 2028, with Google reaching 298 billion dollars in ad revenue.

Helsinki-based Distance Technologies and car manufacturer Kia have announced a collaboration that brings a new generation of lensless XR technology into the future of cars.

The Kia Vision Meta Turismo concept car on display at Milan Design Week is the first car to use the panoramic head-up display (HUD) developed by Distance.

Distance Technologies is a Finnish technology company whose founding team includes former executives and experts from Varjo, known for its virtual headsets. The company's goal is to turn transparent surfaces such as windshields, windows and helmet visors into intelligent user interfaces that provide a sense of depth. The company's computational optics make it possible to blend digital content into the physical environment without the user needing to wear separate VR or AR glasses.

Unlike current head-up displays, which usually appear to the driver only as a small, flat layer of information on the surface of the glass, Distance's solution spans the entire width of the windshield from edge to edge.

OpenAI has released the new GPT-5.5 language model, marking a shift from mere conversational intelligence toward an independently operating AI agent.

According to the company's statement, the new model understands users' goals faster than before and can take responsibility for entire work processes.

GPT-5.5 excels especially at writing and debugging programming code, research based on information retrieval, and moving between different pieces of software and tools.

A user can give the model a complex and even unstructured task, and the AI will be able to plan the work steps itself, use the necessary tools, and navigate through the different stages until the task is completed.

The Social Insurance Institution of Finland, known as Kela, has suffered a massive technical failure starting in the early hours of Thursday, April 23, 2026.

Kela is a government agency responsible for settling benefits under national social security programs, including pensions, unemployment benefits, and student grants, making its digital infrastructure critical for millions of residents. The outage has effectively paralyzed almost all of the agency's customer services, including its online portal, telephone services, and remote appointment systems.

Kela's official website is currently offline, replaced by a temporary emergency site to provide basic information. The primary digital service portal, OmaKela, is also completely inaccessible, preventing users from submitting new benefit applications or checking the status of their payments. According to the agency, remote customer service remains impossible while the systems are down.

Despite the severity of the situation, Kela's IT Director Jukka Melanen has stated that there are currently no indications that the outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack or any other form of cyber interference. The agency's IT department is working closely with its technical partners to identify the root cause and restore services as quickly as possible.

The European Commission has issued its preliminary findings, according to which search engine giant Google must open its search data for use by third parties.

The proposed measures are based on the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), and their goal is to dismantle Google's dominant position in the market. The Commission demands that Google must share data, such as search result rankings, search queries, and click and view counts, on fair and equitable terms.

According to the proposal, the recipients of the data would not only be traditional competing search engines but also AI-powered chatbots that utilize search functionalities.

The Commission believes that access to this information is critical for other players to optimize their own services and offer a real challenge to Google.

Commission Vice-President Henna Virkkunen emphasized that search engines must be able to innovate and keep up with users' changing needs, especially now that AI services are becoming increasingly integrated into searches.

Google has announced that it will fight against the proposals.

The hated so-called Chat Control bill was supposed to fade into the mists of history when the privacy-infringing parts of the legislative initiative failed in the spring of 2026 in a European Union vote.

Chat Control is thus a bill that has been attempted to be pushed through the European Union since 2023 (PDF).

The core of the bill is that all message encryption should be banned throughout the entire European Union.

This means WhatsApp messages could no longer be encrypted in such a way that they could be deemed secure. The same would apply to emails, Signal, and any other message traffic.

The initiative is justified by its supporters, like practically all other ideas that strongly infringe on people's fundamental rights, with the so-called "think of the children...!" argument.

Samsung and furniture giant IKEA have announced a major collaboration that makes building a smart home more affordable and straightforward than before.

Samsung's SmartThings platform will from now on directly support 25 new IKEA devices that use the Matter-over-Thread standard. IKEA released a bunch of Matter-compatible smart devices at the end of last year.

In practice, this means that consumers can connect IKEA's popular smart bulbs, sockets and sensors directly to Samsung's smart home hub without needing IKEA's own Dirigera bridge.

Previously, cross-using these two systems often required both manufacturers' own hubs, which increased both costs and technical complexity.

Technically, the change relies heavily on the Matter-over-Thread combination, which is one of the most significant developments in the smart home world in years.

Matter is, so to speak, a common language between manufacturers that ensures compatibility between devices from different brands, while Thread is a low-power mesh networking technology designed specifically for the needs of small smart home devices.

Amazon is deepening its collaboration with the rapidly growing AI company Anthropic through a 25-billion-dollar investment and a cloud services commitment worth over 100 billion dollars.

Amazon will immediately invest 5 billion dollars in Anthropic and has committed to investing an additional 20 billion dollars in the company if predefined commercial and technical targets are met. The new funding comes on top of two previous 4-billion-dollar rounds in 2023 and 2024, bringing Amazon's total potential investment from 8 billion to 33 billion dollars - if all targets are achieved.

In return, Anthropic commits to using Amazon's cloud services and, in particular, the company's custom Trainium chips to train and run its AI models over the next ten years. As part of the capacity agreement, Anthropic secures up to 5 gigawatts of current and future chip capacity - a scale that the companies compare to the electricity production of five large nuclear power plants.

Over the past six months, Anthropic has faced what is often called a positive problem, as the popularity of its AI solutions, especially among enterprise users, has exploded thanks to the growing success of Claude Code. Anthropic has been forced to tighten usage limits even for paying customers to ensure its server capacity can keep up with demand.

Apple has elected the company's next CEO. Tim Cook, Apple's current CEO and successor to Steve Jobs, will become the company's executive chairman.

Apple's upcoming new CEO is John Ternus who has worked for Apple since 2001 and is currently the senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.

In company's official press release, Tim Cook described Mr. Ternus like this:

John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future. I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with him on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman.

We reported just a couple of days ago that it strongly appears that the use of AI is becoming significantly more expensive.

Companies offering AI solutions have for years distributed the computing power required by AI to users almost for free, incurring huge losses themselves. Now it appears that all the biggest companies in the industry are tightening their policies and making users actually pay the true price for the AI resources used.

Now, the latest to join the ranks is Microsoft-owned GitHub. Its AI assistant, GitHub Copilot, was in many ways the first significant, modern AI product and was released long before ChatGPT.

GitHub stated that the explosive growth of so-called agentic programming has made its fixed monthly pricing model impossible (i.e., significantly unprofitable).

The company is immediately suspending the opening of all new GitHub Copilot accounts for individual users. The change affects all common price tiers, meaning GitHub Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student are all frozen for new users for the time being.