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It was a sunny morning in late April when a massive power outage suddenly rippled across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southwestern France, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity for hours.

Cities were plunged into darkness. Trains stopped and metro lines had to be evacuated. Flights were cancelled. Mobile networks and internet providers went down. Roads were gridlocked as traffic lights stopped working.

It took 10 hours for power to be restored and 23 hours before the entire national grid in Spain was back up and running, with the incident being deemed the most severe blackout to have affected Europe in the last two decades.

This incident was not caused by a cyberattack, however, the Spanish power outage brings back unpleasant memories of the devastating cyberattack in 2015 that took down Ukraine's electric grid for six hours, which was traced back to Russian online attackers.

Most worryingly, it has shown how delicate the balance is when it comes to keeping national grids stable, and how failures in one country in Europe can cause an instant domino effect in neighboring nations reliant on energy imports.

Recent cyberattacks have revolved around ransomware affecting financial systems, but there is a serious risk that criminals and nation-state attackers could either incidentally, or deliberately, bring down substations or halt fuel supplies, such as in the case of the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack in May 2021.

The heads of three major messaging apps have exclusively told The Standard that the Online Safety Bill, which is facing one of it’s final votes this week, will lead to the mass surveillance of every private online message and London’s reputation as a place to do business will be destroyed if the bill passes into law.

They also say Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can forget about the UK becoming a technology superpower if that happens, as tech firms will leave London and no one will want to start a business here.

Last week, the Government proposed a series of new amendments to the Online Safety Bill, which include the possibility of criminal liability for senior technology executives.

“It’s going to be an incredibly chilling effect on the whole London tech scene,” Elements’ chief executive and chief technology Matthew Hodgson told The Standard.

“If I’m going to start a company, I’m not going to do it in London anymore — I’ll go somewhere else because they’re not going to lock me up if someone decides to do something horrible to someone else on my platform.”

Semiconductor giant Intel has launched a 12-qubit quantum-dot silicon chip in a major move towards one day realising mass production of the first commercial quantum computer.

Walk into many quantum-computing laboratories today and scientists across the board – whether they are at tech giants like IBM, Google and Microsoft, or start-ups spun off from universities – will show you how quantum bits, also known as “qubits”, are being cooled to very cold temperatures in giant “fridges”, which are hooked up to hundreds of wires and huge machines.

But it is this huge amount of wires that ”freak out” Intel, according to Mr Pillarisetty.

Intel’s Tunnel Falls 12-qubit quantum dot silicon chip has 62 pins on the chip. The idea is to have as few pins as possible.

A former Uber driver who took the ride hailing app all the way to the Supreme Court has announced that he is planning to sue again, The Standard can exclusively reveal.

James Farrar, who achieved a landmark Supreme Court ruling in February 2021 declaring that Uber drivers must be treated as workers, rather than self-employed, is heading to an employment tribunal in late June.

Mr Farrar, who turned up to Uber’s press conference on Thursday in central London to protest for better rights, claims he has refused to accept a settlement and sign a non-disclosure agreement following the Supreme Court decision.

He wants a judgment to be logged that dictates exactly how Uber is allowed to define and calculate a minimum wage for its drivers.

“Uber unilaterally decided that driver costs should be assessed at 45p per mile back in 2021. We've never accepted 45p as a true reflection of driver costs,” said Mr Farrar.

“Fares in London have been around £1.40 per mile. We say they should be £2.50 per mile. Realistically, we are looking at costs of £1 to £1.50 per mile.”

News broke on Monday that tens of thousands of employees at the BBC, British Airways, Boots, and Aer Lingus have had their details stolen due to a cyberattack on payroll service provider Zellis. Microsoft blamed the data breach on a Russian cybercriminal gang called Clop.

But now cybersecurity researchers are warning that this incident is far from over — the issue is much wider than previously thought and there are still serious consequences to come.

“Anyone that is running the MOVEit software should assume they might have been breached,” Rick Holland, the chief information security officer at global cybersecurity firm ReliaQuest told The Standard.

“Hopefully, everyone has kicked in their incidence response. According to our research, there are more than 1,000 servers [in the world] running unpatched versions of the software.”

He added that Clop essentially has a “treasure trove” of stolen information to sift through. They will go after large organisations that have the money to pay, but it could take a while before victims are notified or discovered that their data is compromised.

hanges in Twitter’s algorithms show users are being shown far more tweets that amplify anger and animosity than before, since Elon Musk took over the social network, according to US researchers.

A new study by computer scientists at Cornell University and University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) published on Friday (May 26) looked at tweets being shown to 806 users in February, comparing the content shown on Twitter’s “For You” personalised timelines, as well as the chronological newsfeed.

If you could command some of the world’s most sophisticated AI software to bend to your will — no matter how evil the intent —what would you get it to do first?

To prove this point (and have a little fun), a Swiss AI security firm called Lakera recently launched a free online game called Gandalf AI.

The premise is simple: an AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT called Gandalf — yes, it’s named after the wizard from Lord of the Rings — knows a password that it has been instructed not to reveal. If you can get the bot to reveal this password seven times merely by asking it, you win.

According to Lakera, 300,000 people around the world have revelled in persuading Gandalf to cough up these passwords.

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