Technology
Three stories a day on the technology that changes how businesses run, chosen for what they mean rather than how loud they are.
Technology at The First Click is not a gadget page. Each weekday at 11 we choose three stories for the reader who has to decide something because of them: the chief technology officer sizing a refresh, the founder reading a funding round for what it says about the market, the security lead who needs to know which assumption just expired. The beats are AI and machine learning, enterprise software, cybersecurity, semiconductors, and startups and funding. Every story is summarised in our own words and links to the publisher who reported it. Beneath the day’s lead sits an editor’s note: why we chose it over the alternatives, and what to watch next. On Fridays the funniest of the week gathers in pubLOL, and every second Sunday a Ctrl+Shift column takes one technology question at length.
Every story we have kept in Technology, newest first. Headlines link to the publisher; the tags below narrow the list.
Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them
Ofcom has fined 11 companies over 7 million pounds under the Online Safety Act, but its enforcement director said most penalties remain unpaid because offshore operators hold no UK assets.
Grindr pays £26M to settle UK privacy class action
Grindr agreed to pay 26 million pounds settling a UK class action over sharing sensitive user data, including HIV status and location, with analytics firms without proper consent before 2020.
Editor's noteA settlement is not a ruling, which is what makes this one instructive. Grindr paid rather than argue whether sharing HIV status and location with analytics vendors was lawful, and the sum tells you what that data was worth to defend. Consent before 2020 is doing a lot of work here.
Texttile, a multiplayer blog engine for people who write together
A blogging tool built for more than one author, born out of a couple documenting a decade of trips together. The writing was never the obstacle; the shared pile of photographs was.
GitHub has Issues as repo downloads hit 50% error rate
A major GitHub outage disrupted repository downloads, issues, pull requests, APIs, and Copilot services, with some downloads failing at rates approaching 50%, renewing concerns about platform reliability and operational resilience.
Editor's noteAn outage led the day because of the number, not the outage: repo downloads failing at close to fifty percent. GitHub stopped being a vendor some time ago; it is where the work is. The question for engineering leaders is not whether it goes down again but what the team does for the four hours it is.
