News

• Donkey Kong Bananza has seemingly been in development for close to eight years
• That's according to producer, Kenta Motokura
• It's entirely possible Bananza has been in development longer than Grand Theft Auto 6

Donkey Kong Bananza is finally launching in a couple of days' time on July 17, 2025 for Nintendo Switch 2, and it seems like it's the end of a very long road for the game's developers.

Bananza's producer, Kenta Motokura, was recently interviewed by Spanish outlet La Vanguardia (via The Gamer) alongside director Kazuya Takahashi. During the interview, Motokura shared some insight in just how long the game took to make.

"I can't give you very precise details, I can tell you that we started developing it after finishing Super Mario Odyssey," said Motokura.

Super Mario Odyssey originally launched for Nintendo Switch in October 2017, meaning Donkey Kong Bananza has likely had a sizeable development period of close to eight years.

That might not be something you'd expect from a game that stars what Karl Pilkington might call "a little hairy fella," but not only does Bananza seem like it's a massive game, it also has impressive and detailed destructible environments.

Much like how The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom had a lengthy six years in development - thanks to its massive additions to the world and impressive physics system - I can imagine Bananza taking a similar time to make for similar reasons.

For further comparison, Rockstar Games parent company, Take-Two Interactive, has claimed that Grand Theft Auto 6 started development "in earnest" only five years ago, around 2020.

So yes, it does seem like the funny monkey game has had a longer development cycle than what is slated to be the most monumental video game release of all time. Food for thought.

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• A new Gemini Space for Pixel feature has leaked
• It displays information like sports scores and birthdays
• The feature is similar to some parts of One UI 8

Changes are coming to the At a Glance widget that sits on the Pixel home screen, according to hidden code spotted in the latest preview version of Android – and it could evolve to be more like a couple of features in Samsung's One UI software.

The code spotting was done by Android Authority, and the team there was able to get something called Gemini Space up and running in Android Canary (the earliest beta version of Android you can get).

We haven't heard anything official about Gemini Space yet, but it looks to be based on At a Glance, and is able to show more information: Sports scores and birthday reminders, for example, as well as weather forecasts and details of calendar appointments. Some of this info can already be displayed on Android through persistent notifications.

All of these updates can be viewed on the lock screen as well as the home screen, and it seems as though users will also have the option to expand these cards into a Daily Hub that delivers relevant information throughout your day.

Displaying contextually relevant information on the home screen and lock screen – including sports scores, timers, and fitness data – sounds a lot like what Samsung is doing with the Now Bar and Now Brief on One UI 7 and One UI 8.

It seems Google has looked at what Samsung is doing, and wants to follow suit. At the same time, you could also argue that Samsung's widgets were inspired by At a Glance on Pixels – and Live Activities on iOS.

We also know that a feature called Live Updates is coming to Android 16, which will put real-time information on the lock screen as well. Across the board we're seeing improvements to how relevant information gets surfaced for users – no matter which make and model of phone you're using.

It's not clear when the new Gemini Space might make its way to Pixel phones, but you can expect major updates to Android 16 as we go through the rest of the year, including a wider rollout of the Material 3 Expressive redesign.

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• French and UK tech experts will collaborate on multiple projects
• One of them is to secure technology used in GPS systems
• GPS needs to be more resilient to blocking and jamming

British and French technology experts will be working together more closely to make GPS and other similar technologies more resistant to disruptions.

The news was announced by the UK Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) earlier this week. As per the announcement, experts from the two countries will work together on a number of different projects, including strengthening the resilience of critical infrastructure to the signal-jamming seen in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

“From our electricity infrastructure, to transport, to financial transactions, the tech we rely on for everyday life depends on reliable Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT), often provided via satellites,” the announcement reads. “The conflict in Ukraine has shown how new technologies – in some cases, just small hand-held devices – can be used to disrupt PNT services, potentially causing major disruption to the vast areas of life and the economy reliant on them.”

One of these complementary technologies, highly resistant to jamming, is e-LORAN, a system that uses ground-based radio towers as a “backup” to GPS. DSIT describes it as being “much more challenging” to block, and as such can keep critical UK infrastructure technology running “even when GPS fails”.

The war in Ukraine seems to have exposed significant weaknesses of today’s GPS systems, which could end up in tragedy. According to Ukrainska Pravda, The Telegraph’s researchers examined Flight Radar data for the first four months of 2024, which included 63 UK military aircraft completing 1,467 flights over Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

“During this time, the United Kingdom’s military aviation flew 504 transport and reconnaissance missions over Eastern Europe, with 142 of them encountering GPS jamming, and in 60 cases, such efforts occurred multiple times,” the publication explained.

At the same time, Business Insider reported that Finnish soldiers were training with “basic navigation tools” - paper maps and compasses, due to the unreliability of GPS systems.

Via The Register

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Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver service fell victim to a simultaneous BGP hijack and route leak event, causing massive internet outages and degradation worldwide. Pakistan caused the most famous BGP outage. The government tried to block access to YouTube within the country. Their misconfiguration caused a worldwide YouTube outage.

Most organizations are targets of attacks 7.5 times a year. And while most are resolved quickly, these are examples of public infrastructure failures that are beyond your control.

What other technology do you rely on every day that was invented in the 1980s? Not your smartphone. Not your car. Not your TV. And definitely not your work tools. Yet, every time you send an email, connect to a website, or deploy a cloud service, you’re relying on core internet protocols that predate the web itself.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) was designed in 1989, an era when the “internet” was barely a concept and security was an afterthought. Back then:

- Home users connected via dial-up modems.

- Businesses considered themselves cutting-edge if they had a T1 line.

- Network reliability was a hope, not an expectation.

BGP’s original purpose was simple: keep the nascent internet stitched together. It provided large institutions with a means to announce which IP address blocks they controlled and to learn about others. The protocol allowed routers across autonomous systems (ASes) to share route announcements and dynamically discover paths to distant networks.

BGP was designed for resilience, not determinism. For openness, not security.

Today, we demand speed, uptime, and security that BGP was never built to deliver. Multi-gigabit fiber reaches homes. Enterprises span multiple clouds across continents. Workloads like real-time video, financial transactions, and machine learning require low-latency, high-throughput data paths.

However, BGP still routes traffic based on trust and reachability, rather than performance or identity. It can’t enforce policies. It can’t prevent hijacks. And it certainly can’t guarantee who’s on the other end.

Despite multiple security incidents and efforts, such as RPKI and BGPsec, the internet still routes traffic based on a chain of trust that can be exploited by anyone with a few malicious route announcements. Most fixes require coordination that doesn’t exist and IT infrastructure upgrades that move at glacial speed.

The result? The modern internet rides on a protocol that thinks it’s still 1992.

Another artifact of that era is the Domain Name System (DNS). Created to make numeric IP addresses human-readable, DNS transformed how people accessed websites. Instead of memorizing strings of numbers, you could simply type in a name.

The problem? DNS is public by design.

Every query, every resolution, and every domain is visible and discoverable. Attackers can enumerate subdomains, discover shadow IT resources, and probe for vulnerabilities – all by posing as legitimate users.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Consider phone numbers. In the 1990s, receiving a call or piece of mail felt like an event. Now? Most calls are spam, and most email is junk. People don’t pick up unless they recognize the number. Our relationship with public identifiers has undergone a fundamental shift.

The same evolution is happening with network services. Public IP addresses and DNS names are easily scraped, scanned, and attacked. In an age of automation and AI-assisted hacking, exposing your infrastructure by default amounts to sending an invitation.

Yet we continue treating server addresses like phone numbers in a white pages directory – a model that no longer works for the threats we face.

Both BGP and DNS reflect assumptions that simply don’t hold up anymore:

- Assumption: Networks are trusted.

-- Reality: Most attacks now originate from within or via compromised peers.

- Assumption: Routes are stable.

-- Reality: Internet routes change unpredictably due to performance tuning, outages, and misconfigurations.

- Assumption: Identities don’t matter.

-- Reality: Zero-trust architecture has become the standard for secure design.

- Assumption: Services are few and fixed.

-- Reality: Modern architectures dynamically spin up and down thousands of services.

The more we scale and automate, the more these assumptions crumble.

The internet’s early architecture was undeniably brilliant for its time. But that time has passed.

Today’s needs are different. We need:

- Deterministic data paths that can be trusted end-to-end.

- Secure naming systems that are private by default.

- Policy-aware routing that aligns with business, performance, and compliance requirements.

- A model where services announce themselves securely to authorized peers, not to the entire internet.

These aren’t enhancements; they’re necessities.

The irony is striking: everything else in tech has evolved dramatically. Compute became elastic. Storage turned redundant and distributed. Deployment went fully automated. But networking? It’s still largely manual, primarily public, and built mainly on 40-year-old concepts.

This should be our wake-up call. We can’t keep patching internet security with duct tape and hoping for the best. It’s time to challenge the status quo and ask a hard question: are the foundational protocols we depend on every day actually fit for purpose anymore?

Security and privacy can’t remain afterthoughts we layer onto a crumbling foundation. They need to be built from the ground up. That means completely reimagining how the internet connects, routes, and identifies everything.

Think about it: what other critical system in your life still runs on ideas from the 1980s?

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Congratulations, fellow Stranger Things fan! You’re on the home stretch of the three year wait between Stranger Things season 4 and Stranger Things season 5. The final episodes will be split into three releases – volume 1 on November 26, volume 2 on December 25 and the season 5 finale on December 31 – so there’s still a small wait to go, but rumour has it we’re getting the first full season 5 trailer at some point this week.

Today (July 15) marks the first time we ever saw one of the best Netflix shows of all time on screen, with the series debuting nine years ago in 2016. If you can’t remember what happened when we last visited Hawkins (and that’s understandable), our group of best friends attempted to defeat Vecna, causing Max's apparent death as well as the opening of a massive rift between the town and the Upside Down. No big deal, I’m sure.

But as Netflix finally tries to get its fanbase excited about the drawn-out end, a painful question has to be asked. Why should anybody care about Stranger Things season 5 when we’ve been left in the lurch for so long? I’m wondering if it would have been less of a hassle to have been eaten by Vecna when we first met him, and that’s a problem.

Let’s put it into context. Since Stranger Things season 4 aired, we’ve had four seasons of The Bear, five seasons of Slow Horses (if you count new episodes we’re going to get in September) and two seasons of Severance… and look how long that took to return. In the Stranger Things world alone, we’ve had the arrival of non-canon West End play The First Shadow, plus the announcement of two spinoffs: animated series Stranger Things: Tales from '85 and live-action show The Boroughs. Everyone and their nan has seemingly complained about not getting season 5 in the meantime, and they’ve got good reason to be annoyed.

Back in the good old days of the mid-2000s, we were regularly whipping through 22-episode seasons of TV like there was no tomorrow. Desperate Housewives and Lost were great examples of this, each requiring a high level of input and resource in their own way. Fast forward two decades, and the consolation prize of feeling lucky to get eight new episodes in three years doesn’t feel like something worth investing in.

Sure, these upcoming episodes are basically feature length movies and the technical craft needed to achieve them is immense, but this is Hollywood, for goodness sake! Every resource we allegedly have at our disposal is supposed to be at the top of its game, able to give us everything we have and haven’t yet dreamed up. From a marketing perspective, Netflix might have thought dragging out the jewel in the crown of its streaming back catalog would make fans hungrier for the end product, but there’s only so far you can stretch the theory in practice.

Of course, I’ll be streaming Stranger Things season 5 like the rest of us, but it will be a reluctant watch. The endless wait over the last few years has definitely made me think twice about investing in shows on one of the best streaming services around, and that’s before we even touch on the frequent cancellations (another story for another day).

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