Author: SKYNEWS

Unavoidable hidden charges for online consumers, a practice known as drip pricing, is to be banned under a wider transparency drive.The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) said additional fees, which are only revealed late in the checkout process and cost customers £2.2bn a year, must be included in the headline price under the planned Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill. The measure will affect things like tickets for trains and the cinema but not optional fees, such as airline seat and luggage upgrades.The crackdown will also see fake reviews added to a list of banned business practices, with website…

Apple’s first Macintosh – the technology that revolutionised personal computers – turns 40 today.The “game-changing” computer first went on sale on 24 January 1984, two days after being introduced to the world in a big-budget Super Bowl advert, by renowned British director Sir Ridley Scott. The advert, referencing George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, was itself considered a watershed moment in advertising – later being described as “more successful than the Mac itself” by Apple’s then marketing guru Regis McKenna.Starring the British athlete Anya Major breaking a screen showing the book’s chief antagonist Big Brother, the advert ended with the tagline:…

The British fund manager abrdn is preparing to cut hundreds of jobs in a cost-cutting drive aimed at boosting its flagging performance.Sky News has learnt that abrdn will announce proposals for a round of redundancies alongside a hastily scheduled trading update on Wednesday morning. It was unclear whether abrdn would give a precise figure for the headcount reductions, although one market source said it could affect in the region of 10% of its workforce of nearly 5,000 people.Analysts expect the company, which was formed from the 2017 merger of Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life, to disclose that it has…

Britons must “strengthen their defences” against the growing threat posed by ransomware developed or enhanced using artificial intelligence (AI), the head of the UK’s cyber security agency has warned. It comes as a new report from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has found that AI is lowering the barrier of entry to novice cyber criminals. The NCSC – which is a part of GCHQ – has also warned that bad actors are using AI to better find and target victims and that the technology will almost certainly increase the volume and impact of cyber attacks in the near term.The…

The leader of an online church who is accused of pocketing $1.3m (£1m) through a cryptocurrency fraud scheme told his followers God told him to do it.Eli Regalado and his wife Kaitlyn marketed their cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, to Christian communities in Denver, Colorado, saying God told him people would become wealthy if they invested, the Colorado Division of Securities said in a statement. They raised nearly $3.2m (£2.5m) from more than 300 people. At least $1.3m of that went directly to the couple or was “used for their own personal benefit”, a complaint filed in Denver County District Court said.According to…

Astronomers have discovered 85 possible planets outside our solar system with temperatures that could be cool enough for life.These exoplanet candidates are similar in size to Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, and were discovered using data from NASA’s Transitioning Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS enables scientists to observe dips in the brightness of stars, known as transits, caused by objects passing in front of them.Typically, at least three transits need to be seen to discover an exoplanet in this way, in order to determine how long they take to orbit their star.However, in the new study, researchers looked at systems that…

Dame Joanna Lumley says she hates it when people secretly take photos of her in public and will always call them out for their “creepy” behaviour.The Absolutely Fabulous star told Sky News: “I never mind doing photographs with people, but what I don’t like is when they steal them. “They don’t ask, you can just see them quietly at a dinner table, going like that [gestures taking a photo] across the restaurant.”I walk over and say, ‘Shall we do a proper picture?’ And they get a bit flustered and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t want to disturb you’, you know? But…

Paying monthly for car insurance can lead to paying hundreds of pounds extra, according to analysis from a leading consumer group.Those who pay an annual sum typically incur less cost, research from Which? said. The group assessed sales data from comparison website GoCompare and found monthly payers were charged £309 more on average than if they paid only on an annual basis.In a month examined last year, September 2023, it cost £892 on average for a year’s cover paid on a monthly basis, while a one-off annual fee was £583.Read moreWhy has the price of car insurance gone up so…

In recent years superhero, fantasy and animation have dominated the movie box office, making billions of pounds for franchises like Marvel and Star Wars. But their runaway success hasn’t been matched with top awards at the Oscars.But Barbie and Oppenheimer could, at this year’s awards, break that trend. Going back to the 1980s and 1990s, the trend had been that box office hits were often rewarded with Academy Award nods, as shown by our analysis of historic box office data and the Academy Awards Database.Read more: Oppenheimer leads Oscar nominations – with big nods for Barbie too But since the…

Completion of the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant has been delayed for up to another four years, according to the French company developing it.The final cost of the power station, which will be the UK’s first new nuclear plant in decades, could also end up being as much as £46bn. The start of electricity production at the site had been scheduled for June 2027 – but a re-evaluation of the schedule suggests that one of the two planned reactors in Somerset will not be ready until 2029.Another evaluation assumes it could be operational a year later, while a final scenario…