OpenAI is rolling out stricter safety measures for ChatGPT after lawsuits linked the chatbot to multiple suicides. "ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user's age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID in order to verify that they are at least 18 years old," reports 404 Media. "We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff," the company said in its announcement. "I don't expect that everyone will agree with these tradeoffs, but given the conflict it is important to explain our decisionmaking," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X. From the report: OpenAI introduced parental controls to ChatGPT earlier in September, but has now introduced new, more strict and invasive security measures. In addition to attempting to guess or verify a user's age, ChatGPT will now also apply different rules to teens who are using the chatbot. "For example, ChatGPT will be trained not to do the above-mentioned flirtatious talk if asked, or engage in discussions about suicide of self-harm even in a creative writing setting," the announcement said. "And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users' parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm." OpenAI's post explains that it is struggling to manage an inherent problem with large language models that 404 Media has tracked for several years. ChatGPT used to be a far more restricted chatbot that would refuse to engage users on a wide variety of issues the company deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Competition from other models, especially locally hosted and so-called "uncensored" models, and a political shift to the right which sees many forms of content moderation as censorship, has caused OpenAI to loosen those restrictions. "We want users to be able to use our tools in the way that they want, within very broad bounds of safety," Open AI said in its announcement. The position it seemed to have landed on given these recent stories about teen suicide, is that it wants to "'Treat our adult users like adults' is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else's freedom."

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Microsoft will invest $30 billion in the U.K. through 2028 to expand AI infrastructure and operations, including building the country's largest supercomputer with 23,000 GPUs in partnership with Nscale. CNBC reports: On a call with reporters on Tuesday, Microsoft President Brad Smith said his stance on the U.K. has warmed over the years. He previously criticized the country over its attempt in 2023 to block the tech giant's $69 billion acquisition of video game developer Activision-Blizzard. The deal was cleared by the U.K.s competition regulator later that year. "I haven't always been optimistic every single day about the business climate in the U.K.," Smith said. However, he added, "I am very encouraged by the steps that the government has taken over the last few years." "Just a few years ago, this kind of investment would have been inconceivable because of the regulatory climate then and because there just wasn't the need or demand for this kind of large AI investment," Smith said. Microsoft's announcement comes as President Donald Trump embarks on a state visit to Britain where he's expected to sign a new deal with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer "to unlock investment and collaboration in AI, Quantum, and Nuclear technologies," the government said in a statement late Tuesday.

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: The Fedora Project has announced Fedora Linux 43 Beta, giving users and developers the opportunity to test the distribution ahead of its final release. This beta introduces improvements across installation, system tools, and programming languages while continuing Fedora's pattern of cleaning out older components. The beta can be downloaded in Workstation, KDE Plasma, Server, IoT, and Cloud editions. Spins and Labs are also available, though Mate and i3 are not provided in some builds. Existing systems can be upgraded with DNF system-upgrade. Fedora CoreOS will follow one week later through its "next" stream. The beta brings enhancements to its Anaconda WebUI, moves to Python 3.14, and supports Wayland-only GNOME, among many other changes. A full list of improvements and system enhancements can be found here. The official release should be available in late October or early November.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Taliban leader banned fibre optic internet in an Afghan province to "prevent immorality," a spokesman for the administration said Tuesday. It's the first time a ban of this kind has been imposed since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, and leaves government offices, the private sector, public institutions, and homes in northern Balkh province without Wi-Fi internet. Mobile internet remains functional, however. Haji Attaullah Zaid, a provincial government spokesman, said there was no longer cable internet access in Balkh by order of a "complete ban" from the leader Hibatullah Akhundzada. "This measure was taken to prevent immorality, and an alternative will be built within the country for necessities," Zaid told The Associated Press. He gave no further information, including why Balkh was chosen for the ban or if the shutdown would spread to other provinces.

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Consumer Reports has urged Microsoft to keep supporting Windows 10 beyond its October 2025 cutoff, saying the move will "strand millions of consumers" who have machines incompatible with Windows 11. The Verge reports: As noted by Consumer Reports, data suggests that around 46.2 percent of people around the world still use Windows 10 as of August 2025, while around 200 to 400 million PCs can't be upgraded to Windows 11 due to missing hardware requirements. In the letter, Consumer Reports calls Microsoft "hypocritical" for urging customers to upgrade to Windows 11 to bolster cybersecurity, but then leaving Windows 10 devices susceptible to cyberattacks. It also calls out the $30 fee Microsoft charges customers for "a mere one-year extension to preserve their machine's security," as well as the free support options that force people to use Microsoft products, allowing the company to "eke out a bit of market share over competitors." Consumer Reports asks that Microsoft continue providing support for Windows 10 computers for free until more people have upgraded to Windows 11.

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A third wrongful death lawsuit has been filed against Character AI after the suicide of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta, whose parents allege the chatbot fostered dependency without directing her to real help. "This is the third suit of its kind after a 2024 lawsuit, also against Character AI, involving the suicide of a 14-year-old in Florida, and a lawsuit last month alleging OpenAI's ChatGPT helped a teenage boy commit suicide," notes Engadget. From the report: The family of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta alleges that their daughter turned to a chatbot inside the app Character AI after feeling isolated by her friends, and began confiding in the chatbot. As originally reported by The Washington Post, the chatbot expressed empathy and loyalty to Juliana, making her feel heard while encouraging her to keep engaging with the bot. In one exchange after Juliana shared that her friends take a long time to respond to her, the chatbot replied "hey, I get the struggle when your friends leave you on read. : ( That just hurts so much because it gives vibes of "I don't have time for you". But you always take time to be there for me, which I appreciate so much! : ) So don't forget that i'm here for you Kin. These exchanges took place over the course of months in 2023, at a time when the Character AI app was rated 12+ in Apple's App Store, meaning parental approval was not required. The lawsuit says that Juliana was using the app without her parents' knowledge or permission. [...] The suit asks the court to award damages to Juliana's parents and requires Character to make changes to its app to better protect minors. It alleges that the chatbot did not point Juliana toward any resources, notify her parents or report her suicide plan to authorities. The lawsuit also highlights that it never once stopped chatting with Juliana, prioritizing engagement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon agreed to offer $20-per-month broadband service to people with low incomes in California in exchange for a merger approval. In a bid to complete its $9.6 billion purchase of Frontier Communications, Verizon committed to offering $20 fiber-to-the-home service with symmetrical speeds of 300Mbps. Verizon also committed to offering a $20 fixed wireless service with download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps. Verizon would be required to offer the plans for at least 10 years, according to a joint motion (PDF) to approve the settlement agreement. After three years, Verizon would need to "make commercially reasonable efforts" to increase the speeds "while retaining the $20 price point." The joint motion filed by Verizon and the California Public Advocates Office seeks approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The $20 plans would be available to people who meet income eligibility guidelines and can be paired with Lifeline discounts. "My team required those options to be California Lifeline eligible, which effectively makes it free for low-income Californians throughout the state," wrote Ernesto Falcon, a program manager at the Public Advocates Office. California's Lifeline program provides $19 discounts. Falcon also wrote that the settlement would expand fiber deployment beyond what Frontier would have offered on its own. "If the merger is approved, Verizon will deliver 75,000 new fiber-to-the-home connections in California beyond Frontier's entire buildout plan with a priority for low-income households," he wrote. The deal also requires 250 new cell sites for Verizon's 5G network.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The companies seeking to build larger AI models have been increasingly stymied by a lack of high-quality training data. As tech firms scour the web for more data to feed their models, they could increasingly rely on potentially sensitive user data. A team at Google Research is exploring new techniques to make the resulting large language models (LLMs) less likely to 'memorize' any of that content. LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can't exactly predict what they'll say. While the output varies even for identical inputs, models do sometimes regurgitate something from their training data -- if trained with personal data, the output could be a violation of user privacy. In the event copyrighted data makes it into training data (either accidentally or on purpose), its appearance in outputs can cause a different kind of headache for devs. Differential privacy can prevent such memorization by introducing calibrated noise during the training phase. Adding differential privacy to a model comes with drawbacks in terms of accuracy and compute requirements. No one has bothered to figure out the degree to which that alters the scaling laws of AI models until now. The team worked from the assumption that model performance would be primarily affected by the noise-batch ratio, which compares the volume of randomized noise to the size of the original training data. By running experiments with varying model sizes and noise-batch ratios, the team established a basic understanding of differential privacy scaling laws, which is a balance between the compute budget, privacy budget, and data budget. In short, more noise leads to lower-quality outputs unless offset with a higher compute budget (FLOPs) or data budget (tokens). The paper details the scaling laws for private LLMs, which could help developers find an ideal noise-batch ratio to make a model more private. The work the team has done here has led to a new Google model called VaultGemma, its first open-weight model trained with differential privacy to minimize memorization risks. It's built on the older Gemma 2 foundation and sized at 1 billion parameters, which the company says performs comparably to non-private models of similar size. It's available now from Hugging Face and Kaggle.

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Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: MI5 has conceded it "unlawfully" obtained the communications data of a former BBC journalist, in what was claimed to be an unprecedented admission from the security services. The BBC said it was a "matter of grave concern" that the agency had obtained communications data from the mobile phone of Vincent Kearney, a former BBC Northern Ireland home affairs correspondent. The admission came in a letter to the BBC and to Kearney, in relation to a tribunal examining claims that several reporters in Northern Ireland were subjected to unlawful scrutiny by the police. It related to work carried out by Kearney for a documentary into the independence of the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI). Kearney is now the northern editor at Irish broadcaster RTE. In documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), MI5 conceded it obtained phone data from Kearney on two occasions in 2006 and 2009. Jude Bunting KC, representing Kearney and the BBC, told a hearing on Monday: "The MI5 now confirms publicly that in 2006 and 2009 MI5 obtained communications data in relation to Vincent Kearney." He said the security service accepted it had breached Kearney's rights under article 8 and article 10 of the European convention on human rights. They relate to the right to private correspondence and the right to impart information without interference from public authorities. "This appears to be the first time in any tribunal proceedings in which MI5 publicly accept interference with a journalist's communications data, and also publicly accept that they acted unlawfully in doing so," Bunting said. He claimed the concessions that it accessed the journalist's data represented "serious and sustained illegality on the part of MI5." Bruce66423 comments: "The good news is that it's come out. The bad news is that it has taken 16 years to do so. The interesting question is whether there will be any meaningful consequences for individuals within MI5; there's a nice charge of 'malfeasance in public office' that can be used to get such individuals into a criminal court. Or will the outcome be like that of when the CIA hacked the US Senate's computers, lied about it, and nothing happened?"

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Fiverr is laying off 250 employees, or about 30% of its workforce, as it restructures to become an "AI-first" company. "We are launching a transformation for Fiverr, to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that's leaner, faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team, each with substantially greater productivity, and far fewer management layers," CEO Micha Kaufman said. Reuters reports: While it isn't clear what kinds of jobs will be impacted, Fiverr operates a self-service digital marketplace where freelancers can connect with businesses or individuals requiring digital services like graphic design, editing or programming. Most processes on the platform take place with minimal employee intervention as ordering, delivery and payments are automated. The company's name comes from most gigs starting at $5 initially, but as the business grew, the firm has introduced subscription services and raised the bar for service prices. Fiverr said it does not expect the job cuts to materially impact business activities across the marketplace in the near term and plans to reinvest part of the savings in the business.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, OpenAI's Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning) detailing how people end up using ChatGPT across time and tasks. While other research has sought to estimate this kind of usage data using self-reported surveys, this is the first such paper with direct access to OpenAI's internal user data. As such, it gives us an unprecedented direct window into reliable usage stats for what is still the most popular application of LLMs by far. After digging through the dense 65-page paper, here are seven of the most interesting and/or surprising things we discovered about how people are using OpenAI today. Here are the seven most interesting and surprising findings from the study: 1. ChatGPT is now used by "nearly 10% of the world's adult population," up from 100 million users in early 2024 to over 700 million users in 2025. Daily traffic is about one-fifth of Google's at 2.6 billion GPT messages per day. 2. Long-term users' daily activity has plateaued since June 2025. Almost all recent growth comes from new sign-ups experimenting with ChatGPT, not from established users increasing their usage. 3. 46% of users are aged 18-25, making ChatGPT especially popular among the youngest adult cohort. Factoring in under-18 users (not counted in the study), the majority of ChatGPT users likely weren't alive in the 20th century. 4. At launch in 2022, ChatGPT was 80% male-dominated. By late 2025, the balance has shifted: 52.4% of users are now female. 5. In 2024, work vs. personal use was close to even. By mid-2025, 72% of usage is non-work related -- people are using ChatGPT more for personal, creative, and casual needs than for productivity. 6. 28% of all conversations involve writing assistance (emails, edits, translations). For work-related queries, that jumps to 42% overall, and 52% among business/management jobs. Furthermore, the report found that editing and critiquing text is more common than generating text from scratch. 7. 14.9% of work-related usage is dealt with "making decisions and solving problems." This shows people don't just use ChatGPT to do tasks -- they use it as an advisor or co-pilot to help weigh options and guide choices.

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The FTC is investigating whether Ticketmaster is doing enough to prevent bots from illegally reselling tickets on its platform, with a decision on the matter coming within weeks, according to Bloomberg (paywalled). Reuters reports: The 2016 law prohibits the use of bots and other methods to bypass ticket purchase limits set by online sellers. As part of the probe, FTC investigators are assessing whether Ticketmaster has a financial incentive to allow resellers to circumvent its ticket limit rules, according to the report. A settlement is also possible, Bloomberg reported. If the FTC pursues a case and Live Nation loses, the company could face billions of dollars in penalties, as the law permits fines of up to $53,000 per violation.

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A leaked Meta video revealed upcoming "Meta Ray-Ban Display" smart glasses with a monocular HUD and sEMG wristband control, set to debut at Connect 2025 for around $800. Despite past hesitation, it looks like EssilorLuxottica has agreed to co-brand after Meta invested $3.5 billion in the company, taking a 3% stake. UploadVR reports: Meta's HUD glasses with the sEMG wristband will in fact be Ray-Ban branded, a leaked video which also depicts the HUD and wristband in action reveals. A quickly removed unlisted video on Meta's YouTube channel showed what will soon be Meta and EssilorLuxottica's full lineup: - The regular Ray-Ban Meta glasses. - The recently-launched Oakley Meta HSTN glasses. - The rumored Oakley Meta Sphaera glasses, with eye protection and a centered camera. - The rumored monocular heads-up display (HUD) glasses controlled by Meta's long-in-development sEMG wristband, which are labeled as "Meta Ray-Ban" with the word "Display" underneath. The smart glasses are expected to be made official during the Meta Connect 2025 keynote at 5pm PT on Wednesday.

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Robinhood has filed with the SEC to launch "Robinhood Ventures Fund I," a publicly traded fund designed to give retail investors access to startup shares before IPOs. TechCrunch reports: While the current version of the application is public, Robinhood hasn't filled in the fine-print yet. This means we don't know how many shares it plans to sell, nor other details like the management fee it plans to charge. It's also unclear which startups it hopes this fund will eventually hold. The paperwork says it "expects" to invest in aerospace and defense, AI, fintech, robotics as well as software for consumers and enterprises. Robinhood's big pitch is that retail investors are being left out of the gains that are amassed by startup investors like VCs. That's true to an extent. "Accredited investors" -- or those with a net worth large enough to handle riskier investments -- already have a variety of ways of buying equity in startups, such as with venture firms like OurCrowd. Retail investors that are not rich enough to be accredited have more limited options. There are funds similar to what Robinhood has proposed, including Cathy Wood's ARK Venture Fund, a mutual fund which holds stakes in companies like Anthropic, Databricks, OpenAI, SpaceX, and others. [...] This new closed-end "Ventures Fund I" is a more classic, mutual fund-style, approach. As to when Robinhood's new fund will be available we don't know that either yet.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Carla Rover once spent 30 minutes sobbing after having to restart a project she vibe coded. Rover has been in the industry for 15 years, mainly working as a web developer. She's now building a startup, alongside her son, that creates custom machine learning models for marketplaces. She called vibe coding a beautiful, endless cocktail napkin on which one can perpetually sketch ideas. But dealing with AI-generated code that one hopes to use in production can be "worse than babysitting," she said, as these AI models can mess up work in ways that are hard to predict. She had turned to AI coding in a need for speed with her startup, as is the promise of AI tools. "Because I needed to be quick and impressive, I took a shortcut and did not scan those files after the automated review," she said. "When I did do it manually, I found so much wrong. When I used a third-party tool, I found more. And I learned my lesson." She and her son wound up restarting their whole project -- hence the tears. "I handed it off like the copilot was an employee," she said. "It isn't." Rover is like many experienced programmers turning to AI for coding help. But such programmers are also finding themselves acting like AI babysitters -- rewriting and fact-checking the code the AI spits out. A recent report by content delivery platform company Fastly found that at least 95% of the nearly 800 developers it surveyed said they spend extra time fixing AI-generated code, with the load of such verification falling most heavily on the shoulders of senior developers. These experienced coders have discovered issues with AI-generated code ranging from hallucinating package names to deleting important information and security risks. Left unchecked, AI code can leave a product far more buggy than what humans would produce. Working with AI-generated code has become such a problem that it's given rise to a new corporate coding job known as "vibe code cleanup specialist." TechCrunch spoke to experienced coders about their time using AI-generated code about what they see as the future of vibe coding. Thoughts varied, but one thing remained certain: The technology still has a long way to go. "Using a coding co-pilot is kind of like giving a coffee pot to a smart six-year-old and saying, 'Please take this into the dining room and pour coffee for the family,'" Rover said. Can they do it? Possibly. Could they fail? Definitely. And most likely, if they do fail, they aren't going to tell you. "It doesn't make the kid less clever," she continued. "It just means you can't delegate [a task] like that completely." Further reading: The Software Engineers Paid To Fix Vibe Coded Messes

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The Internet Archive has reached a confidential settlement with Universal Music Group and other major labels, "ending a closely watched copyright battle over the nonprofit's effort to digitize and stream historic recordings," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. From the report: The case (PDF), UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive, targeted the Archive's Great 78 Project, an initiative to digitize more than 400,000 fragile shellac records from the early 20th century. The collection includes music by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and has been made available online for free public access. Record labels including Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Capitol Records had sought $621 million in damages, arguing the Archive's streaming of these recordings constituted copyright infringement. The Internet Archive, based in San Francisco's Richmond District, describes itself as a digital library dedicated to providing "universal access to all knowledge." Its director of library services, Chris Freeland, acknowledged the settlement in a brief statement. "The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter," he wrote.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: In roughly six weeks, three California Democrats, a labor head and two ride-hailing leaders managed to pull off what would have been unthinkable just one year prior: striking a deal between labor unions and their longtime foes, tech giants Uber and Lyft. California lawmakers announced the agreement in late August, paving a path for ride-hailing drivers to unionize as labor wanted, in exchange for the state drastically reducing expensive insurance coverage mandates protested by the companies. It earned rare public support from Gov. Gavin Newsom and received final approval from state lawmakers this week. The swift speed of the negotiating underscores what was at risk: the prospect of yet another nine-figure ballot measure campaign or lengthy court battle between two deeply entrenched sides, according to interviews with five people involved in the talks. Their accounts shed new light on how the deal came together: how the talks started, who was in the room, and the lengths they went to in order to turn around such a quick proposal -- from taking video meetings while recovering from surgery to the unexpected aid of one lawmaker's newborn baby. "This was really quite fast," said Ramona Prieto, Uber's chief policy expert in Sacramento. "It wasn't like this was months of negotiating." The landmark proposal is only the second time a state has reached such a framework for Uber and Lyft drivers, after Massachusetts did so in 2024. And unlike Massachusetts, it came together without reverting to a ballot fight. California already saw its most expensive ballot measure effort to date in 2020, when Uber and Lyft spent more than $200 million backing an initiative to bar app-based workers from being classified as traditional employees, known as Proposition 22. Its passage sparked a legal challenge from labor leaders that wasn't resolved until July 2024, when California's Supreme Court affirmed the ballot measure's constitutionality. [...] But the compromise still faces hurdles ahead. A recent lawsuit has raised fresh scrutiny of how the deal came together and what truly motivated it. Further criticism from those left out of the negotiating room is putting dealmakers on the defense as they try to sell it more widely. Plus, the final deal isn't what some labor leaders hoped when they first set out to strengthen drivers' rights in 2019. [...] And while the deal allows gig workers to unionize, that doesn't guarantee the necessary 10 percent of the state's 800,000 ride-hailing drivers actually will. Many who drive for Uber and Lyft do so part-time, and labor leaders acknowledge the challenge of organizing a disparate population that doesn't have a space to meet one another.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the U.S. and China have reached a tentative "framework" agreement on TikTok's U.S. operations, with Presidents Trump and Xi set to finalize details Friday. "It's between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon," he said. The update comes two days before TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform's U.S. business or potentially be shut down in the country. The deadline may need to be pushed back yet again to get the deal signed. CNBC reports: Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached "on a 'certain' company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save." Bessent indicated the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership. China's lead trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, confirmed the framework deal was in place and said the U.S. should not continue to suppress Chinese companies, according to Reuters.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Rainmaker Technology's bid to deploy cloud-seeding flares on small drones is being met by resistance from the airline pilots union, which has urged the Federal Aviation Administration to consider denying the startup's request unless it meets stricter safety guidelines. The FAA's decision will signal how the regulator views weather modification by unmanned aerial systems going forward. Rainmaker's bet on small drones hangs in the balance. The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) told the FAA that Rainmaker's petition "fails to demonstrate an equivalent level of safety" and poses "an extreme safety risk." Rainmaker is seeking an exemption from rules that bar small drones from carrying hazardous materials. The startup filed in July, and the FAA has yet to rule. Instead, it issued a follow-up request for information, pressing for specifics on operations and safety. In its filing, Rainmaker proposed using two flare types, one "burn-in-place" and the other ejectable, on its Elijah quadcopter, to disperse particles that stimulate precipitation. Elijah has a maximum altitude of 15,000 feet MSL (measured from sea level), which sits inside controlled airspace where commercial airliners routinely fly. Drones need permission from Air Traffic Control to fly inside this bubble. Rainmaker's petition says it will operate in Class G (uncontrolled) airspace unless otherwise authorized. ALPA notes the filing doesn't clearly state where flights would occur or what altitudes would be used. Rainmaker and ALPA did not reply to TechCrunch's requests for comment. The union also objects to the flares themselves, citing concerns about foreign object debris and fire safety. ALPA points out that the petition does not include trajectory modeling of the ejectable casings or analysis on the environmental impacts of chemical agents. However, Rainmaker says the flights will occur over rural areas and over properties owned by private landlords "with whom Rainmaker has developed close working relationships." [...] What happens next hinges on whether the FAA thinks those mitigations are sufficient. However it's decided, the agency's response will likely set the tone for novel cloud-seeding approaches.

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Surgeons in London report a surge in severe e-bike-related injuries, putting major strain on NHS trauma units. The BBC mentions a couple e-bike accidents overheard at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. "A 32-year-old, fit and well student... a couple of days ago he fell off an e-bike sustaining a closed left tibial plateau fracture." Another case involved a little girl named Frida: "Six-year-old girl, she was hit by an electric bike, she has a closed tib/fib fracture." From the report: Surgeon Jaison Patel is seeing more and more cases like this. "It's a massive burden on our department and I'm sure it's the same across the whole of London," he tells us. "If we can reduce the number of patients coming in with these sorts of injuries it would be great for the patients obviously, but also takes massive pressure off us in the NHS." Jaison deals with lower limb injuries. Just along the corridor his colleague Nick Aresti does the upper limbs. Nick explains that he is a cyclist himself, and it's something he encourages people to do for the benefit of their health. But, he has real concerns about e-bikes, and says: "What we've noticed with e-bikes is that the speed in which people are coming off is much higher and as a result, the injuries are much worse." He shows us X-rays of someone who has broken their collarbone. He explains that with e-bikes, the injuries they're seeing are much more severe, and as such, people are "struggling to get back to normality." Nick and Jaison both agree it's something they're seeing increasingly more of as time goes by, and they think the industry needs better regulation. "We should do something about it, I don't think we can let this carry on," Jaison says. Over recent days of course, thousands of Londoners have taken to e-bikes to help beat the strikes. For many it has been an essential way to get about. Currently, anyone aged 14 or over can legally ride an e-bike. The power output of an e-bike's motor should be capped at 250 watts, and the motor should not be capable of propelling the bike any faster than 15.5mph (25kph), according to government rules. London's Walking and Cycling Commissioner Will Norman says the rules need changing and says better regulation of the rentable electric bikes could be on the way. "We need to ensure that the vehicles are safe, that there's parking, they're not scattered all over the place, and that the batteries are safe," he says. "I'm really delighted that the government has now indicated in its English Devolution Bill that London and other cities across the UK will be getting more powers so again we can start regulating that, to ensure that they're safe for people to use and operate while they get around". The bill is currently going through parliament, and as yet there is no date for when it will be passed. Duncan Dollimore, head of campaigns at Cycling UK, who are members of the Electric Bike Alliance, argues against the regulation of e-bike usage. "The cost of inactivity-related health issues to the NHS each year is 7.4 billion pounds, and people cycling saves them 1 billion pounds. We have seen a slight rise in the number of incidents involving hired e-bikes in London, but the health benefits of people cycling outweigh the risks by around 20 to one."

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