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2 Jul 2025

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'Better dead than single': The dark comedy inspired by 'bleak' dating scene
Kat Sadler and her sister Lizzie Davidson on writing and starring in series two of Such Brave Girls.

Dating app scam victims told 'don't suffer in silence'
Students are being targeted by romance scams on dating apps, but talking to a friend can help avoid the danger.

It may look like a rom-com, but Materialists is not a first-date movie
Materialists may star Hollywood heart-throbs, but it's not quite what it appears. Director Celine Song talks about making a rom-com that shows the reality of modern dating.

Young US men are joining Russian churches promising 'absurd levels of manliness'
A religion with traditions dating back centuries is attracting young American men.

Private data including criminal records stolen in Legal Aid hack
MoJ says data includes addresses, national ID numbers, criminal histories and financial details dating to 2010.

Ex-Warriors coach on ‘final warning’ for criticism of NRL match officials
In a rare move, the NRL cited ‘consistent criticism’ of its match officials from Todd Payten, dating back to his time in charge of the Warriors.

Devastating Spectre CPU bug returns to haunt Intel processors
Intel has spent much of its goodwill with customers chasing down bugs: the Spectre and Meltdown bugs it dealt with years ago, as well as the instability that plagued its Raptor Lake processors last year. Now there are additional chapters in each of those stories. You don’t have to do anything — just make sure your PC is patched and up to date. But there will be a price to pay in performance in fixing the latest issue, and one you can’t really do anything about. On May 1, Intel issued yet another microcode update for the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. Those processors could degrade over time due to elevated operating voltages, Intel said last July. But the recent update was designed to prevent instability on systems “running multiple days with low-activity and lightly-threaded workloads” — or machines that weren’t working at their full capacity. Mitigating that bug, Intel said, will not only solve the problem, but performance fortunately will not be affected. Instead, any variation after applying the patch would be within normal “run-to-run variation,” Intel said. Unfortunately, researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered another bug that affects a number of Intel processors, dating back to the 2018 Skylake architecture. This time, mitigating it will have a significant effect, although the effects will be most pronounced in the much-maligned 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” chips. As noted by Bleeping Computer, the new bug hearkens all the back to 2018, when the Spectre and Meltdown bugs were discovered, affecting the kernel software at the heart of most X86 chips. Though Intel patched out both bugs, researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered that branch target injection attacks (known as a “branch privilege injection”) can again be used against Intel CPUs to leak otherwise protected information. The affected chips include everything from 2018’s Skylake to Raptor Lake. AMD’s Zen 5 and Zen 4 chips are not affected, the researchers found. More information can be found at the ETH Zurich site. Proper security practices usually call for researchers to privately disclose bugs to the manufacturers before they’re released to the public, and the researchers did just that. Intel released microcode to the research team for testing and to confirm the microcode update works. To avoid being preyed upon by either vulnerability, what you need to do remains the same: simply make sure that your PC is properly patched, either via Windows Update or via the firmware updates your PC maker or motherboard maker provides. However, there will be a performance price to pay, too. ETH Zurich said that it won’t be too bad: just a 2.7 percent drop in performance in Alder Lake and 1.6 percent in the 2018 Skylake (Coffee Lake Refresh) chip. If you still own an 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” chips, however, you’re going to pay a price: an estimated 8.3 percent drop in performance. Knocking almost 10 percent off the performance of what was an already subpar chip may mean that it’s time for an upgrade.

Bumble says it will cut 240 jobs, or about 30% of its global workforce
The online dating platform expects to see US$40 million in annual cost savings spanning from the workforce reductions.

China has millions of single men - could dating camp help them find love?
The film The Dating Game explores how a dating coach tries to help China's single men find love.

Prolific Tauranga shoplifter sentenced to two years in prison
A 45-year-old woman has been sentenced to two years in prison after being convicted of 37 shoplifting offences across Tauranga dating back to September 2024.

NBA star accused of rape, years of abuse
Zion Williamson is being sued by a woman describing herself as a former dating partner and who alleges the New Orleans Pelicans star committed repeated sexual violence against her.

‘Heard a couple of cracks’: The brave Dolphin who played on with a broken rostrum
Why Kurt Donoghoe, who broke his nose, was never going to stay off the field – and his hopes that his new look doesn’t harm his chances in the dating game.

Fake AI voice scammers are now impersonating government officials
You probably know that it’s easy enough to fake audio and video of someone at this point, so you might think to do a little bit of research if you see, say, Jeff Bezos spouting his love for the newest cryptocurrency on Facebook. But more targeted scam campaigns are sprouting up thanks to “AI” fakery, according to the FBI, and they’re not content to settle for small-scale rug pulls or romance scams. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a public service announcement yesterday, stating that there’s an “ongoing malicious text and voice messaging campaign” that’s using faked audio to impersonate a senior US official. Exactly who the campaign is impersonating, or who it’s targeting, isn’t made clear. But a little imagination—and perhaps a lack of faith in our elected officials and their appointees—could illustrate some fairly dire scenarios. “One way the actors gain such access is by sending targeted individuals a malicious link under the guise of transitioning to a separate messaging platform,” warns the FBI. It’s a familiar tactic, with romance scammers often trying to get their victims off dating apps and onto something more anonymous like Telegram before pumping them for cash or blackmail material. And recent stories of federal employees and bosses communicating over Signal, or some less savory alternatives, have given these messaging systems a lot of exposure. Presumably, the scammers contact a specific target using an unknown number and pretend to be their boss or some other high-ranking official, using an attached voice message to “prove” their identity. These have become trivially easy to fake, as recently demonstrated when billionaires like “Elon Musk” and “Mark Zuckerberg” started confessing to heinous crimes via the speakers at Silicon Valley crosswalks. “Deepfakes” (i.e., impersonating celebrities via animated video and voice) have now become extremely common online. The FBI recommends the usual protection steps to avoid being hoodwinked: don’t click on sketchy links over text or email, don’t send money (or crypto) to anyone without lots of verification, and use two-factor authentication. One thing I’ve recently done with my family (since my ugly mug is all over TikTok via PCWorld’s short videos) is to establish a secret phrase with my family to give us a way to authenticate each other over voice calls. But with automation tools and hundreds of thousands of potential targets in the US government, it seems inevitable that someone will slip up at some point. Hopefully, federal law enforcement won’t be too busy with other matters to take care of real threats.