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A new NYT Strands puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing 'today's game' while others are playing 'yesterday's'. If you're looking for Tuesday's puzzle instead then click here: NYT Strands hints and answers for Tuesday, June 24 (game #478).

Strands is the NYT's latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it's great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc's Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don't read on if you don't want to know the answers.

• Today's NYT Strands theme is… Worth the splurge

Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.

• DOOM
• SCONE
• MENU
• BEND
• FURY
• TILE

• Spangram has 11 letters

First side: top, 4th column

Last side: left, 7th row

Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM.

The answers to today's Strands, game #479, are…

• WATCH
• HANDBAG
• JEWELRY
• PERFUME
• CONVERTIBLE
• SPANGRAM: LUXURY GOODS

• My rating: Easy
• My score: Perfect

Not much of a stretch today, with all the words hiding in plain sight with minimal twists. The biggest surprise was the very rare sight of a spangram that started at the top and ended at the side.

“Worth the splurge” immediately had me thinking about family vacations, which are nearly always worth spending your hard-earned cash on. Instead, after finding WATCH and HANDBAG it became obvious we were looking for the standard array of LUXURY GOODS.

The thing all the items we were searching for today have in common is that they are all non essential and that cheaper versions of all of them are readily available, although with the exception of PERFUME all can be justified as splurge-worthy as they do not depreciate at the same rate as those cheaper versions (that’s what we tell ourselves anyway).

How did you do today? Let me know in the comments below.

• FLAXSEED
• PROBIOTIC
• CALCIUM
• ZINC
• MAGNESIUM
• SPANGRAM: SUPPLEMENTS

Strands is the NYT's not-so-new-any-more word game, following Wordle and Connections. It's now a fully fledged member of the NYT's games stable that has been running for a year and which can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.

I've got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you're struggling to beat it each day.

Over the last year, threat actors have upped the ante with their plots to disrupt vital business and public services – and they have had increasingly successful outcomes. In fact, the UK government estimates that some of the most disruptive breaches cost businesses, of any size, an average of approximately £1,205. When looking at medium and large enterprises, this cost increases to approximately £10,830.

The UK government recognizes the increasing dependence of businesses and organizations on digital technologies, which are vulnerable to constantly evolving cyberattacks. To address this, it is investing £2.6 billion in the National Cyber Strategy to enhance and protect the UK’s online presence.

Central to this effort is promoting ‘cyber resilience’ – organizations' ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from cyberattacks and security breaches. This resilience is fundamental to operational continuity, business growth and the overall health of the UK economy.

Considering there were almost 9 million DDoS attacks globally in the second half of 2024, per NETSCOUT’s latest Threat Intelligence Report, the government’s greater focus on building cyber resilience is much needed. While the number of DDoS attacks across 2H2024 increased by more than 12 percent from the first half of the year, attacks are also more sophisticated than ever before.

For instance, application programming interfaces (APIs) paired with automation allows threat actors to carry out multitarget DDoS campaigns with minimal supervision, significantly increasing their attack efficiency.

Additionally, advanced techniques such as carpet-bombing, IPv6 abuse, internet service provider (ISP) masking and geo-spoofing expand attack reach for threat actors, allowing them to target victims regardless of their location, and bypass defenses.

The combination of increased frequency and sophistication of attacks increases the risk to businesses of being attacked. As has been seen from countless highly publicized incidents – such as the sophisticated cyberattack on Transport for London that disrupted services across the city in September – the devastation caused by DDoS attacks is significant.

When websites and business-critical applications are taken offline, the results are lost revenue, unhappy customers and irreparable damage to an organization's brand. The threat is continuing to grow so it is more important than ever for ISPs and enterprises to fully protect their networks and other critical infrastructure. To achieve this, organizations must look for more efficient and effective DDoS defense systems.

At a global level, there has been a noticeable increase in sophisticated DDoS hacktivism. Hacktivist groups have showcased their advanced technical capabilities, launching politically motivated cyberattacks against governments, infrastructure, and organizations around the world.

For example, NoName057(16) is the dominant actor behind geopolitical DDoS campaigns, focusing its efforts on government websites in the UK, Belgium, and Spain. In the last few years, this activity has signaled the beginning of a new era of cyber threats.

Geopolitical events drove massive attack spikes in 2024, with DDoS attacks increasingly becoming a weapon for political unrest. Threat actors have exploited periods of national vulnerability to amplify chaos and undermine confidence in institutions. For instance, Israel experienced a 2,844 percent surge in February tied to the conflict in Gaza, and Georgia saw a 1,489 percent increase in April leading up to the “Russia bill”.

These examples highlight the extent to which DDoS has become a go-to tool in sociopolitical conflicts – being deployed during elections, protests, and policy disputes – and how public sector and enterprise defenses need a rethink. Since attackers use a variety of techniques, ranging from custom-built tools to surprisingly simple methods, the need for robust and adaptable security measures is greater than ever.

The threat posed by DDoS attacks is a serious concern for businesses. Despite the prevalence of these attacks, the dangers often go unnoticed, with malicious traffic frequently mistaken for legitimate activity. Clever hackers can leave organizations vulnerable, even if they believe their defenses are robust.

To mitigate DDoS attacks, organizations should focus on reducing or terminating harmful traffic as soon as it is detected. Increasing network capacity is also crucial, as it helps absorb malicious traffic and prevents systems from being overwhelmed. Additionally, completely blocking anonymous and remote systems can make targets inaccessible to attackers, adding an extra layer of protection.

By implementing these strategies, organizations can enhance their visibility and resilience against DDoS attacks, navigating the complex landscape of cybersecurity with greater confidence.

The importance of keeping up with cyber threats cannot be overstated. Businesses should have a powerful DDoS protection system in place and regularly assess their network infrastructure. Just as organizations regularly prepare for fire drills by testing their alarms, proactively reassessing and regularly enhancing security measures is essential to stay afloat in the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape. With the shifting nature of DDoS threats, it is imperative for businesses to stay ahead of the curve, or they risk the severe consequences that come with being the victim of a DDoS attack.

After all, the devastating impact of cyberattacks across sectors has been seen globally with too many instances to count. Therefore, organizations need to be aware of current threat trends and prioritize their defense strategies. With comprehensive visibility, actionable threat intelligence and the right security team in place, businesses can build the awareness and resilience needed to navigate today’s threat landscape effectively.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

As a business founder in the tech space I am spending increasing amounts of time thinking about AI and its impact. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the beginning of the end of humanity? Or is it our savior?

The truth almost certainly lies somewhere in the middle, but that said, I believe there are very clear reasons why businesses really should be worried about AI.

Amara’s Law states that the impact of technologies is overestimated in the short term but underestimated in the long term. Driverless cars, which have been coming out next year every year since 2016, is an example of overestimation.

Artificial neural networks, the key technology behind almost all AI systems you’ve heard of, might be good at playing Breakout and even predicting how proteins fold, but it cannot (yet) cope with the chaos of roads that, in my home village of Greenwich, were laid down by feet and hooves hundreds of years ago.

Amara’s Law works because researchers and practitioners, some driven by greed, others by fortune and others still by curiosity, but all of them nonetheless driven, find ways to improve the technology, find uses for it and eventually batter it into shape.

For business this is a worry for two reasons. On the one hand, if managers overestimate the readiness of a technology, then they tend to allocate too many resources to implementing it immediately at scale. Such quick ramp-ups are always followed by embarrassing climb downs.

On the other hand, if a technology is underestimated, like many did with the cloud and are doing right now with Artificial Intelligence, then all of a sudden they will find themselves playing catch up to their competitors.

The second reason to worry is that general purpose systems, like the content of Pandora’s box, cannot be put back once let out. For example, in the hands of Tim Berners-Lee, the personal computer and the Internet became the web. In the hands of a failed physicist in a garage in Seattle, the web gave birth to Amazon.com. What will artificial neural networks become in the hands of a hacker?

The box has been opened and we cannot put back the knowledge, the discoveries or the opportunities, good and bad, that opening the box created.

The third reason is the dramatic and continued effects on the labor market. Way before 2025 raised its head, McKinsey and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPCC) were worrying about job losses and what the latter called the upcoming ‘job apocalypse’.

As I see it the job apocalypse seems to be coming to pass. Announcements are made daily about governments opening up their data to private firms to train their artificial neural networks and of companies shedding their workforces and replacing them with AI ‘agents’. We all know talented people who have never previously been out of a job but now can’t find one.

Businesses have a triple challenge: rearranging their teams to work alongside AI agents, reassuring those left in the workforce, even though realistically there is nothing reassuring about what is happening, and doing so whilst the Damoclean Sword of Artificial Intelligence is suspended not by a horse’s hair but by something much less tenuous: the whims of a man in an office looking at a spreadsheet.

The fourth reason is probably the worst of all.

In the early part of the 2010s, Cambridge Analytica illegally collected the personal data of millions of Facebook users. From that data, psychographics, a portmanteau of psychology and demographics, were used to place targeted political advertisements into the social media streams of millions of people.

These political messages nudged enough people to vote for Donald Trump in the US presidential election of 2016. For their role in the Cambridge Analytica scandals, Facebook was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade commission. By the time that happened, Donald Trump had already won the election.

Since 2016, sustained upheaval in the labor market continues to cause a remarkable amount of misery. In the UK, the latest reports state that 5.2 million children live in poverty. That’s 1 in every 3 children. In the United States, in 2023, the child poverty rate increased to 13.7 per cent.

Class tensions have always preceded the rise of populist, strong-men leaders. In 2016, when good old fashion propaganda collided with good old fashioned data theft, web technologies graduated from tools of commerce to… the ultimate tool of propaganda on planet Earth.

Artificial Intelligence, including the creation of deep fakes, is coming of age at the exact same moment when content moderation teams are being dismantled and strong man politics is on the rise. This new, unfettered age of disinformation has collided with people that are so desperately poor and devoid of hope that they will vote for anyone who promises to take down the elites who made them suffer so much. Politicians of all stripes sowed the wind. We all now have to reap the whirlwind.

Business leaders might not think they have the luxury of thinking about politics, yet if they work in technology they are simultaneously part of the problem and potentially the solution. Ignorance is no defense!

Artificial Intelligence is a tidal wave that is currently breaking, and breaking things, all around us. Because it’s already here, commentary on AI is a peculiar, often confusing and an almost always out of date, mixture of description and prediction.

There’s some consensus on the past but not much consensus on the future. AI is likely to become cheaper and easier to wield and exactly where it takes us will depend on the politics and ethics (or lack thereof) of the user.

And Amara’s Law tells us that AI is about to get really practical any moment. Welcome to the future.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

• Canadian telecom firms have been hit with a cyberattack
• Chinese threat actor Salt Typhoon is suspected to be behind the attacks
• Hackers exploited an existing Cisco flaw to gain access

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, alongside the FBI, have confirmed hackers were able to gain access to three network devices registered to a Canadian Telecommunications company.

“The Cyber Centre is aware of malicious cyber activities currently targeting Canadian telecommunications companies. The responsible actors are almost certainly PRC state-sponsored actors, specifically Salt Typhoon,” The Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity said in a statement.

This isn’t unfamiliar territory for Salt Typhoon, as the group compromised at least eight US telco giants earlier in 2025, with the hackers allegedly having access to these networks for months in a mass surveillance campaign affecting dozens of countries and targeting several high-level officials.

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The hackers, apparently exploited a high severity Cisco flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-20198 to gain access, allowing them to retrieve running configuration files from the compromised devices, which were then modified in order to create a GRE tunnel, enabling traffic collection from the network the devices were connected to.

A patch for this flaw has been available since October 2023, which indicates a serious security oversight in Canadian Telecom cybersecurity.

The threat actors most likely targeted these devices in order to ‘collect information from the victim’s internal network, or use the victim’s device to enable the compromise of further victims,’ which could explain how Salt Typhoon has been so successful in compromising large organizations.

“While our understanding of this activity continues to evolve, we assess that PRC cyber actors will almost certainly continue to target Canadian organizations as part of this espionage campaign, including telecommunications service providers and their clients, over the next two years,” the statement confirms.

Telecommunication companies are a high-priority for threat actors as they store large amounts of customer data and have useful intelligence value for cyber-espionage campaigns.

Via: ArsTechnica

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It's been five breakneck years since Apple unveiled Apple silicon during its first virtual WWDC keynote amid a global pandemic. Even without the visceral on-stage moment of CEO Tim Cook emerging from the shadows to unveil a huge helping of Apple platform excitement, this was momentous.

As I wrote back then:

"One world, one universe, one platform, unification. Apple’s momentous Worldwide Developer’s Conference keynote just painted a picture of a world in which the walls come down and, from the silicon underneath to the pixels in front of your face, Apple’s ecosystem becomes one."

What Apple Silicon will bring to the Mac. #WWDC20 #WWDC2020 pic.twitter.com/oqJ4MtG8zVJune 22, 2020

Apple switching hardware platforms was not unheard of – after all, only 14 years earlier, it had migrated its systems from IBM and Motorola's PowerPC to Intel.

This time, though, was different. Like an 'A' student preparing for finals, Apple was deeply prepped for this new transition. It used XCode to rewrite all its first-party apps, and worked with major partners like Microsoft and Adobe to ensure that core third-party apps were able to run on the revolutionary new hardware. There was even a Developers Transition Kit ready to go for app partners.

Rosetta 2, a software compatibility layer, was also released, promising to ease the transition for non-Arm-ready apps.

Back then, I was well aware of the potential benefits of a five-nanometer, power-saving platform. It was the holy grail of mobile computing, one that Microsoft had already approached, though less successfully, with Windows on Arm in the Surface X Pro, which ran on the SQ2 chip.

Apple silicon would transform MacBooks from decent battery performers to 17-hour marathoners. I had my concerns about the integrated graphics, but also knew that graphics performance on Apple's bespoke A-series chips on the iPhone and iPad was always stellar, so I also had reason for hope.

I saw the potential, writing, "What Apple’s doing is switching all its systems from running on a variety of fuels, like wind, solar, and gas, to just one that might arguably be described as rocket fuel."

And yet, I had no intention of switching from Windows to Mac.

It's not that I was unfamiliar with the Mac. I'd used the OG Macintosh in the 1980s but switched for good to Windows when I joined PCMag in the early 1990s.

Windows was for me like an old but beloved car. It could be clunky and even sometimes break down in the middle of the road, but I knew every control and contour. It molded to me, and I, a bit, to it. I knew its foibles, but also knew how to work around them. That no Windows laptop could ever give me more than five hours of battery life (on a good day) was something I accepted, along with the fact that I felt like the blue screen of death was always lurking around some unforeseen corner.

Barely five months after the announcement, and developers got their hands on the transition kit, which, among other things, helped them build Universal apps for all systems running Apple silicon. I reviewed the first Apple MacBook Air with the M1 chip. I called it "an astonishing breakthrough."

Benchmarks made a mockery of even Intel Core i7 systems, especially in the area of integrated graphics. Battery life was incredible, ranging between 15 and 20 hours. I knew, intuitively, that such a system could transform my life.

Even so, the idea of switching from Windows to macOS (the operating system Macs run) was daunting. I think I worried that, with time, I might discover that most of my key apps didn't work on Apple silicon or that Apple wouldn't meet its two-year deadline of fully transitioning away from Intel, and that it might even abandon the project altogether and return to Intel.

I needn't have worried. By 2023, even the Mac Pro had switched to an M2 Ultra. I was impressed with Apple's innovative approach to producing ever more powerful Apple silicon chips, often by clustering them together (the M2 Ultra really is two M2 Max chips). What's more, I never found an app that wouldn't run on Apple silicon.

Three years into the Apple silicon journey, I switched to the M2 MacBook Air and documented the effort in a journal. There were some struggles, but almost all of them revolved around long-standing differences between macOS and Windows. I was forced to learn many new keyboard commands and shortcuts.

Two weeks into my journey, I wrote:

"Becoming second nature to use the Mac. Will I ever go back?"

Spoiler alert: I never did.

If Apple had failed to deliver on the Apple silicon promise it made on June 22, 2020, this would've been a different story (one that might more closely resemble Apple Intelligence). The fact that it made the effort early on to make the hard stuff look easy (supporting all those apps, making different platform apps work on different systems, making it rock-solid stable, and providing industry-leading efficiency) put the wind at Apple silicon's back. Apple showed immediate commitment by unveiling the MacBook Air M1, along with an iMac and a Mac Mini in those first six months.

Apple has never looked back and continues to build and innovate on the Apple silicon platform to deliver more powerful mobile CPUs. It's only in the last year or so that, with the help of Qualcomm, the Windows world has started to catch up, nearly matching Apple silicon in performance, efficiency, and stability.

Apple silicon changed the computing world, but it also changed me. I walked away from a platform I loved (and still have affection for) and have not looked back. Apple's market share has grown on the back of Apple silicon, and, and least in that Mac space, I think the best is yet to come.

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• MindsEye's disastrous launch has resulted in layoffs at developer Build A Rocket Boy
• Sources told IGN that layoffs are expected to affect over 100 employees
• Build A Rocket Boy has confirmed that the redundancy process has begun

Build A Rocket Boy has been hit with layoffs following MindsEye's disastrous launch.

The futuristic, single-player narrative game was released earlier this month for PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC, to an overwhelmingly poor reception.

From performance problems, bugs, and countless other technical issues, Mindseye's Steam page now sits at a 'Mostly Negative' rating with over 1840 user reviews, with Build A Rocket Boy promising fixes.

Now, two weeks after launch, sources tell IGN that the studio has begun the redundancy process amid the game's poor release, and layoffs are expected to affect over 100 employees.

An anonymous source told the publication that there's no word on how many people will be impacted, but that the standard 45-day consultation process started on June 23, which is triggered when an employer proposes 100 or more redundancies within 90 days in the UK.

It's understood that Build A Rocket Boy has roughly 300 UK employees currently working at the studio, and around 200 abroad.

"We can confirm that we have had to make the painful decision to notify our hardworking team of some internal changes at Build A Rocket Boy," the studio has now confirmed in a statement to IGN.

"While we are working to reassign roles for as many of those impacted by these changes as possible, sadly we are initiating a formal consultation process that may result in redundancies. This decision has not been made lightly, and we are committed to handling this process with transparency, fairness, and respect for all employees. We will provide further details to the team over the coming weeks."

"The launch of MindsEye has been a significant milestone for Build A Rocket Boy, but we know that we still have a lot more to do to grow our community in the coming years. The challenges we’ve faced have only strengthened our resolve and, while we are deeply saddened by today’s decision and thankful to our incredible team, this shift allows us to focus on delivering ongoing updates and performance optimization for MindsEye, while also ensuring the long-term success of Build A Rocket Boy’s future ambitions."

The studio has previously confirmed that it has post-launch plans "already in motion" for the game and that players can expect more updates and refinements "coming shortly after release".

It also said it had plans to support the game for years, but hasn't revealed its roadmap just yet.

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News has surfaced from China that Geely is poised to release the world’s first range-extender hybrid vehicle that is also compatible with the country’s growing network of battery-swapping stations.

Badged the Haoyue R7, Car News China says that it is essentially a rebadged version of the Geely Livan 7 all-electric flagship SUV, which was among the first Geely models to support battery swap.

The process of driving into a dedicated facility and having a robot autonomously replace the entire battery pack has been pushed by CATL, China’s largest EV battery maker, and the electric vehicle brand Nio, which has even started to introduce facilities to parts of Europe.

It is reported that the upcoming Haoyue R7 will be compatible with CATL’s battery swap technology, allowing owners to either juice-up from home, use the much faster public charging network, or take advantage of battery-swapping stations.

What’s more, the 1.5-liter, naturally-aspirated petrol engine can act as a generator to charge the onboard battery packs for longer journeys.

No official range figures have been released as of yet, but even the smallest battery pack on the Livan 7 can manage almost 280 miles on a single charge, so when you factor in the range extender, it could easily manage double that.

Although very much a niche powertrain in the Chinese market, it will offer customers an unparalleled choice of how they get around, opening up the idea of electric vehicles to more and attempting to prove that range anxiety should no longer be an issue.

According to a recent report by the BBC, Nio has now built over 3,300 battery swap stations in China, with the company looking to expand across the country over the next few years.

Currently, a number of taxis, buses and heavy-duty trucks are making use of battery-swap technology in China, as these vehicles tend to have more predictable movement patterns that make the entire process a lot easier to manage.

But through advances in software, it is also becoming far simpler for electric vehicle brands to manage entire EV fleets, with the ability to work out which vehicle needs its batteries brimmed and what the most effective way to do this is.

Tesla, for example, pioneered a “connected” Supercharger network that helps point drivers towards the most accessible and fastest charger in the vicinity, pre-conditioning the battery for the most efficient top-ups.

Battery swap stations are not just another quick method to get drivers moving again (the process takes around five minutes), it can also drastically reduce the initial cost of a new vehicle.

Geely says the Haoyue R7 will be offered without the battery pack, giving customers the opportunity to pay a small monthly fee to rent the batteries and take advantage of the CATL battery swap network.

This has proven extremely popular with Taiwanese company Gogoro’s battery swap network, which uses much smaller packs to power two-wheel scooters, mopeds and smaller capacity motorcycles in a number of global markets.

Not only is the cost of the motorcycle in question far less expensive to purchase outright – even when paired with partner Yamaha’s products – it’s also more convenient, with users able to pull up to a station, swap batteries out by hand (there’s no need for robots, as the packs are so small) and get on their way.

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