Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

Thanks to what will seem like a somewhat unlikely pairing to many, it is now possible to access Spotify in ChatGPT. With the two services having partnered, you can now use tracks and podcasts to achieve things with the AI chat bot.

There are various possibilities here – from asking ChatGPT to create new playlists based on the tracks you like to receive recommendations about podcasts you may enjoy. While the ability to use Spotify in conjunction with ChatGPT is free, there are more options available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

Meta has announced an update to Facebook algorithms which may achieve something quite rare – actually surfacing content that people genuinely want to see. The change affects Reels specifically, and users are being given far greater control over what they see in their feeds.

As well as making it easier to indicate a preference for a particular type of video – or, indeed, express a dislike for others – the update makes it possible to prioritize displaying new content. This is not the end of the story; there are also new “friend bubbles” which Meta hopes will encourage users to engage in conversations about content on the platform.

Both Microsoft and Valve have issued warnings about flaws in the Unity engine that could expose gamers to attack. A new version of Steam has been released to plug the security hole as well.

Tracked as CVE-2025-59489, the Unity Gaming Engine Editor vulnerability has a severity rating of 8.4. The nature of Unity is such that the flaw affects multiple platforms – Windows, Linux, macOS and Android. There is good news for some, however; Xbox consoles, Xbox Cloud Gaming, iOS and HoloLens all remain unaffected.

Advertising is how Meta makes money, hence Facebook users being bombarded with ads and “recommended content”. Starting today you may receive a notification that things are about to change. Unsurprisingly, they are not changing for the better.

Meta says that it is going to “start personalizing content and ad recommendations on our platforms based on people’s interactions with our generative AI features”. What does this mean? Targeted ads, essentially.

The situation regarding Red Hat’s recent data breach is worsening – both for the company and for its customers. With GitLab instances belonging to the company having been breached by the Crimson Collective, hundreds of gigabytes of data were stolen.

Now the data breach has transformed into a demand for ransom – perhaps predictably. Interestingly, though, the extortion is not being perpetrated by the Crimson Collective, but by ShinyHunters.

With just a week to go until Windows 10 reaches the end of mainstream support, attention is increasingly turning to Windows 11. And with the release of the latest Dev build of the operating system, Microsoft is making changes to the OOBE.

The Out Of Box Experience is what Microsoft calls what most people refer to as the installation and setup process. With the latest changes, Microsoft is closing loopholes used to create local accounts, thereby forcing the use of a Microsoft Account.

A ruling by a Dutch court could ultimately force Meta to make sweeping changes to timeline appearance in the likes of Facebook and Instagram. While it is possible to switch form an algorithm-controlled timeline to a chronological one, the court says that this should be made more accessible.

What could this mean? Right now, it is difficult to say for sure, but it could be the case that – in some jurisdictions, at least – Meta could be required to make a chronological timeline the default.

Oracle has released an emergency patch and an urgent security warning about a 0-day vulnerability in Oracle E-Business Suite.

Tracked as CVE-2025-61882, the security flaw has a severity rating of 9.8 and is described as an “easily exploitable vulnerability”. Oracle warns that the vulnerability is “remotely exploitable without authentication”, going some way to explaining why it is seen as being so serious an issue.

Anyone who thought command line tools were in danger of being consigned to the history books, Google’s unveiling of Jules Tools put pay to that idea.

For anyone not familiar with Google’s offerings, Jules Tools is a command line interface for its Jules asynchronous coding agent. Google is hardly setting a trend here – there are command line interfaces available for other AIs – but with Jules itself only having launched in December, the speed is a little surprising.

The personal data of Discord users has been exposed after a third-party customer service provider suffered a data breach.

Hackers were able to obtain support tickets from an unnamed company used by Discord to provide support. From this, they were then able to gain access to data including names and government-issued IDs.

Google has announced that it is now possible to send Gmail end-to-end encrypted emails to anyone. Until this change was introduced, E2E emailing was only supported between Gmail to Gmail communications.

But now email encryption is being opened up and made platform agnostic. While this means that encrypted emails can be sent to anyone, it is something that needs to be enabled, and there are a few things to keep in mind.

Perplexity is the latest company to release an AI-powered web browser. Comet is available free of charge for Windows and macOS, and it is looking to compete with the likes of Opera’s Neon.

Comet is not brand new. It launches in July to a limited audience, but now its AI powers are being made available to everyone. But while there is much excitement from Perplexity about the launch, and excitement from users, there is also a warning from security experts.

Microsoft has officially announced a subtle revamp of its Microsoft 365 icons. Taking something of a cue from Google, the redesign is subtle and sees a switch towards using gradients and flowing colors.

The update is the first for Office icons since 2018, and this latest change is a gentle revisiting and dialling up of the changes that were introduced then. This is not a rebrand or a major change, but a pleasing evolution.

Apple has removed from its App Store, ICEBlock – described as “Waze but for ICE sightings”. The app launched back in April after Donald Trump announced a crackdown on immigration.

ICEBlock provides people with a way to report sightings of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents. The US Department of Justice was among those voicing concerns that agent tracking put people’s lives at risk, particularly in light of attacks on ICE facilities.

The Spotify recommendation algorithm is problematic, and easily sent askew by random tracks you listen to. The company has just announced that it is rolling out the option for users around the world to exclude individual tracks

This may sound like something we’ve heard before, but previous exclusion options have related to playlists. Now you can stop that one song your kid keeps listening to from causing your recommendations to be in a similar vein.