UK tech job openings have surged 21% to pre-pandemic levels, driven largely by a 200% spike in demand for AI skills. London accounted for 80% of the AI-related postings. The Register reports: Accenture collected data from LinkedIn in the first and second week of February 2025, and supplemented the results with a survey of more than 4,000 respondents conducted by research firm YouGov between July and August 2024. The research found a 53 percent annual increase in those describing themselves as having tech skills, amounting to 1.69 million people reporting skills in disciplines including cyber, data, and robotics. [...] The research found that London-based companies said they would allocate a fifth of their tech budgets to AI this year, compared to 13 percent who said the same and were based in North East England, Scotland, and Wales. Growth in revenue per employee increased during the period when LLMs emerged, from 7 percent annually between 2018 and 2022 to 27 percent between 2018 and 2024. Meanwhile, growth in the same measure fell slightly in industries less affected by AI, such as mining and hospitality, the researchers said.

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Over 400 prominent UK media and arts figures -- including Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Ian McKellen -- have urged the prime minister to support an amendment to the Data Bill that would require AI companies to disclose which copyrighted works they use for training. The Register reports: The UK government proposes to allow exceptions to copyright rules in the case of text and data mining needed for AI training, with an opt-out option for content producers. "Government amendments requiring an economic impact assessment and reports on the feasibility of an 'opt-out' copyright regime and transparency requirements do not meet the moment, but simply leave creators open to years of copyright theft," the letter says. The group -- which also includes Kate Bush, Robbie Williams, Tom Stoppard, and Russell T Davies -- said the amendments tabled for the Lords debate would create a requirement for AI firms to tell copyright owners which individual works they have ingested. "Copyright law is not broken, but you can't enforce the law if you can't see the crime taking place. Transparency requirements would make the risk of infringement too great for AI firms to continue to break the law," the letter states. Baroness Kidron, who proposed the amendment, said: "How AI is developed and who it benefits are two of the most important questions of our time. The UK creative industries reflect our national stories, drive tourism, create wealth for the nation, and provide 2.4 million jobs across our four nations. They must not be sacrificed to the interests of a handful of US tech companies." Baroness Kidron added: "The UK is in a unique position to take its place as a global player in the international AI supply chain, but to grasp that opportunity requires the transparency provided for in my amendments, which are essential to create a vibrant licensing market." The letter was also signed by a number of media organizations, including the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, and the National Union of Journalists.

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A majority of Britons may now consider themselves neurodivergent, with conditions such as autism, dyslexia or ADHD, according to a leading psychologist from King's College London. Professor Francesca Happe, an expert in cognitive neuroscience, said reduced stigma around these conditions has prompted more people to seek medical diagnoses or self-diagnose. "Once you take autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and all the other ways that you can developmentally be different from the typical, you actually don't get many typical people left," Happe told BBC Radio 4. Autism diagnoses increased 787% between 1998 and 2018 in the UK, with estimated prevalence rising from one in 2,500 children 80 years ago to one in 36 today. Happe, who was appointed CBE in 2021 for her autism research, warned that behaviors previously considered "a bit of eccentricity" are now being labeled with medical terms.

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The UK financial regulator is preparing to ban retail investors from using borrowed funds such as credit card balances to invest in cryptocurrency as it seeks to overhaul supervision of the fast-growing digital assets market. The Guardian: The soaring values of virtual currencies such as bitcoin after Donald Trump's election have put pressure on the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to take a tougher line while it also lays the groundwork for the industry to flourish in the UK. According to a recent YouGov survey, the proportion of people in the UK using borrowed funds to make crypto purchases more than doubled from 6% in 2022 to 14% last year. Borrowing to fund investments, when asset values could change dramatically, meant consumers risked losing their entire investment and potentially other assets, such as their home. These characteristics closely resembled gambling, the Treasury committee found.

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Almost all new homes in England will be fitted with solar panels during construction within two years, the UK government will announce after Keir Starmer rejected Tony Blair's criticism of net zero policies. From a report: Housebuilders will be legally required to install solar panels on the roofs of new properties by 2027 under the plans. The policy is estimated to add between $4,000 and $5,320 to building a home but homeowners would save more than $1,331 on their annual energy bills, according to the Times. Labour has set a target of building 1.5m homes by the end of the parliament. The party has promised to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 and cut household energy bills by $400 a year.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: British laws restricting what the police can say about criminal cases are "not fit for the social media age (source paywalled; alternative source)," a government committee said in a report released Monday in Britain that highlighted how unchecked misinformation stoked riots last summer. Violent disorder, fueled by the far right, affected several towns and cities for days after a teenager killed three girls on July 29 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England. In the hours after the stabbings, false claims that the attacker was an undocumented Muslim immigrant spread rapidly online. In a report looking into the riots, a parliamentary committee said a lack of information from the authorities after the attack "created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow." The report blamed decades-old British laws, aimed at preventing jury bias, that stopped the police from correcting false claims. By the time the police announced the suspect was British-born, those false claims had reached millions. The Home Affairs Committee, which brings together lawmakers from across the political spectrum, published its report after questioning police chiefs, government officials and emergency workers over four months of hearings. Axel Rudakubana, who was sentenced to life in prison for the attack, was born and raised in Britain by a Christian family from Rwanda. A judge later found there was no evidence he was driven by a single political or religious ideology, but was obsessed with violence. [...] The committee's report acknowledged that it was impossible to determine "whether the disorder could have been prevented had more information been published." But it concluded that the lack of information after the stabbing "created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow, further undermining public confidence," and that the law on contempt was not "fit for the social media age."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Requests to remove books from library shelves are on the rise in the UK, as the influence of pressure groups behind book bans in the US crosses the Atlantic, according to those working in the sector. Although "the situation here is nowhere [near] as bad, censorship does happen and there are some deeply worrying examples of library professionals losing their jobs and being trolled online for standing up for intellectual freedom on behalf of their users," said Louis Coiffait-Gunn, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip). Ed Jewell, president of Libraries Connected, an independent charity that represents public libraries, said: "Anecdotal evidence from our members suggests that requests to remove books are increasing." The School Library Association (SLA) said this year has seen an "increase in member queries about censorship." Most of the UK challenges appear to come from individuals or small groups, unlike in the US, where 72% of demands to censor books last year were brought forward by organised groups, according to the American Library Association earlier this week. However, evidence suggests that the work of US action groups is reaching UK libraries too. Alison Hicks, an associate professor in library and information studies at UCL, interviewed 10 UK-based school librarians who had experienced book challenges. One "spoke of finding propaganda from one of these groups left on her desk," while another "was directly targeted by one of these groups." Respondents "also spoke of being trolled by US pressure groups on social media, for example when responding to free book giveaways."

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New submitter toutankh writes: The UK government is developing a tool to predict murder. The scheme was originally called the "homicide prediction project", but its name has been changed to "sharing data to improve risk assessment". The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it "chilling and dystopian".The existence of the project was uncovered by Statewatch rather than announced by the UK government. PR following this discovery looks like uncoordinated damage control: one stated goal is to "ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis", but a spokesperson also said that it is "for research purpose[s] only". One criticism is that such a system will inevitably reproduce existing bias from the police. What could go wrong?

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The United Kingdom has banned "outrageous fake reviews and sneaky hidden fees" to make life easier for online shoppers. From a report: New measures under the Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumer Act 2024 came into force on Sunday that require online platforms to transparently include all mandatory fees within a product's advertised price, including booking or admin charges. The law targets so-called "dripped pricing," in which additional fees -- like platform service charges -- are dripped in during a customer's checkout process to dupe them into paying a higher price than expected. The ban "aims to bring to an end the shock that online shoppers get when they reach the end of their shopping experience only to find a raft of extra fees lumped on top," according to Justin Madders, the UK's Minister for Employment Rights, Competition and Markets.

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U.K. postmasters were mistakenly sent to prison due to a bug in their "Horizon" accounting software — as first reported by Computer Weekly back in 2009. Nearly 16 years later, the same site reports that now the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission "is attempting to contact any former subpostmasters that could have been prosecuted for unexplained losses on the Post Office's pre-Horizon Capture software. "There are former subpostmasters that, like Horizon users, could have been convicted of crimes based on data from these systems..." Since the Post Office Horizon scandal hit the mainstream in January 2024 — revealing to a wide audience the suffering experienced by subpostmasters who were blamed for errors in the Horizon accounting system — users of Post Office software that predated Horizon have come forward... to tell their stories, which echoed those of victims of the Horizon scandal. The Criminal Cases Review Commission for England and Wales is now reviewing 21 cases of potential wrongful conviction... where the Capture IT system could be a factor... The SCCRC is now calling on people that might have been convicted based on Capture accounts to come forward. "The commission encourages anyone who believes that their criminal conviction, or that of a relative, might have been affected by the Capture system to make contact with it," it said. The statutory body is also investigating a third Post Office system, known as Ecco+, which was also error-prone... A total of 64 former subpostmasters in Scotland have now had their convictions overturned through the legislation brought through Scottish Parliament. So far, 97 convicted subpostmasters have come forward, and 86 have been assessed, out of which the 64 have been overturned. However, 22 have been rejected and another 11 are still to be assessed. An independent group, fronted by a former Scottish subpostmaster, is also calling on users of any of the Post Office systems to come forward to tell their stories, and for support in seeking justice and redress.

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