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A new NYT Connections 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 Sunday's puzzle instead then click here: NYT Connections hints and answers for Sunday, August 31 (game #812).

Good morning! Let's play Connections, the NYT's clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you've finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I've also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc's Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

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

Today's NYT Connections words are…

• PRESIDENT
• MOTHER
• BISHOP
• BIRD
• CLERGY MEMBER
• PREMIERE
• M.L.B. PLAYER
• POPE
• SAINT
• VALENTINE
• INTRODUCTION
• N.F.L. PLAYER
• LORDE
• LAUNCH
• BURNS
• SAINT PATRICK
• DEBUT

What are some clues for today's NYT Connections groups?

• YELLOW: When it begins
• GREEN: National day 
• BLUE: Wordsmiths
• PURPLE: Linked by a word associated with red

Need more clues?

We're firmly in spoiler territory now, but read on if you want to know what the four theme answers are for today's NYT Connections puzzles…

What are the answers for today's NYT Connections groups?

• YELLOW: FIRST APPEARANCE 
• GREEN: ONES CELEBRATED WITH HOLIDAYS 
• BLUE: FAMOUS POETS 
• PURPLE: WHAT "CARDINAL" MIGHT REFER TO 

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

The answers to today's Connections, game #813, are…

• YELLOW: FIRST APPEARANCE DEBUT, INTRODUCTION, LAUNCH, PREMIERE
• GREEN: ONES CELEBRATED WITH HOLIDAYS MOTHER, PRESIDENT, SAINT PATRICK, SAINT VALENTINE
• BLUE: FAMOUS POETS BISHOP, BURNS, LORDE, POPE
• PURPLE: WHAT "CARDINAL" MIGHT REFER TO BIRD, CLERGY MEMBER, M.L.B. PLAYER, N.F.L. PLAYER

• My rating: Hard
• My score: Fail

Congratulations to anyone who completed today’s Connections. A round for me which bordered on the impossible.

In part, my difficulty with today’s game fell down to two areas of ignorance – American sports and poetry. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who thought we were looking for a connection to the New Zealand singer LORDE as opposed to the poet Audre Lorde. But this wasn’t too much of an issue, as I was unaware of BISHOP and POPE too.

After comfortably getting the yellow group I struggled to make headway and fell into the obvious trap of trying to put together a group connected by religion and then leadership.

I did manage to put together ONES CELEBRATED WITH HOLIDAYS, but with one mistake left and completely clueless I crashed out after letting a shuffle do the guessing for me.

• YELLOW: CRITICIZE HARSHLY BASH, BLAST, FLAME, ROAST
• GREEN: COMMON COMPONENTS OF BOARD GAMES BOARD, CARDS, DICE, PIECES
• BLUE: HETERONYMS AXES, BASS, COORDINATE, DOES
• PURPLE :___STICKS CHOP, DRUM, FIDDLE, FISH

NYT Connections is one of several increasingly popular word games made by the New York Times. It challenges you to find groups of four items that share something in common, and each group has a different difficulty level: green is easy, yellow a little harder, blue often quite tough and purple usually very difficult.

On the plus side, you don't technically need to solve the final one, as you'll be able to answer that one by a process of elimination. What's more, you can make up to four mistakes, which gives you a little bit of breathing room.

It's a little more involved than something like Wordle, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for the game to trip you up with tricks. For instance, watch out for homophones and other word games that could disguise the answers.

It's playable for free via the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.

• UK startup Somni claims to have invented the world's first "battery-free streaming earbuds for sleep"
• The earbuds are small and wireless, made to be comfortable to use in any sleeping position
• According to SomniBuds, these sleep buds never need to be charged — but a few things remain unclear

A British startup claims to have found the perfect solution to many sleeping woes. Whether you struggle with insomnia or need a little white noise to fall asleep, these new earbuds could potentially help.

SomniBuds are flat and small streaming earbuds that are made to be used while sleeping. Thanks to their unusual shape, they're apparently optimized for every sleeping position. And although they're completely wireless, SomniBuds also claims that you'll never have to go out of your way to recharge them.

So are these sleep buds a strong new alternative to the likes of the Loop Dream, and how do they work? Here's everything we know so far.

SomniBuds are streaming earbuds for sleeping, made by UK startup Somni. They're not the only sleeping earbuds or earplugs out there – alternatives, such as the Bose Sleepbuds II, have been around a while, alongside newer contenders like the aforementioned Loop Dream. However, Somni claims that its new buds have a few things that the competition doesn't offer.

The biggest standout feature is the fact that these earbuds don't have a battery. They're also wireless, which might make for a confusing combination. How can battery-free hardware be wireless and yet never need to be recharged?

Admittedly, the technical details are still pretty scarce here, but Somni claims that you won't need to use a charging case or a similar device. Instead, you'll place the SomniMat, which is a charging mat made specifically for these earbuds, under your pillow or your mattress. While you sleep, the earphones will wirelessly connect to the charging mat, enabling them to run all night long.

On paper, this sounds fantastic. However, it's unclear just how reliable the connection between the mat and the earbuds will be. Will this charging style work in every sleeping position? What if you roll over to the other side of the bed? Those are some of the things we're looking forward to exploring during some in-person listening, but the signs from our friends at Shortlist(who have been trying out a pair) are very promising.

SomniBuds are 3mm thin and have a flat, unobtrusive design that looks like it'd be comfortable to sleep in – well, at least as comfortable as sleeping with something in your ears can ever be. The startup claims that the earphones are a quarter of the size of traditional Bluetooth sleepbuds.

SomniBuds won't require an app to use and can be paired with any kind of audio, including Spotify, podcasts, movies, and white noise apps.

So, how can you actually try these out? This is where more questions start cropping up. The earbuds are not yet available for sale, but we do know a few things about what's in store for them this year.

Somni promises that the SomniBuds will be available through Kickstarter in "late summer", so we can't have too long to wait now.

However, if you're really excited about these, you can pay $1 to get a 33% discount that you can use when they do come out. You just need to reserve a spot, although Somni says that only 300 early backers will be allowed to sign up.

The SomniBuds (presumably complete with the charging mat) will be priced at $229 / £224 (around AU$465) without the discount, and $199 / £149 (about AU$310) with the 33% off deal. Early backers will also receive a bonus pair of earbuds.

As with any Kickstarter or crowdfunded project, all of the usual caveats apply and it's important to be cautious. We have no guarantee that these earbuds will make it to market at all, and it's unclear when they'll be fully available for sale.

However, if you're struggling for shuteye and are looking for some earbuds that are designed specifically for sleep, they could be a new contender to watch out for –particularly if those charging-free claims hold up during real-world use.

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• Microsoft has revealed how it protects Azure with an Integrated HSM chip
• Azure security stack includes Azure Boost, Hydra BMC and Caliptra 2.0
• Cybercrime reportedly worth $10.2 trillion annually, making it the world’s third-largest economy in 2025

Microsoft has revealed more on the custom-built security chip it deploys across every Azure server, aiming to counter what it calls a cybercrime “pandemic” now costing $10 trillion annually.

The Azure Integrated HSM, which was first announced in late 2024, is the centerpiece of a wider security architecture the company outlined at the recent Hot Chips 2025 event.

A slide Microsoft showed there claims the global cost of cybercrime is currently $10.2 trillion - meaning it now ranks as the equivalent of the third-largest economy in the world.

The trillion-dollar estimate places cybercrime behind the United States and China, but ahead of Germany and Japan, and also far bigger than the entire AI market.

Microsoft said the scale of the threat requires both architectural and operational changes.

As ServeTheHome reports, the company listed a number of statistics at the event, including that Azure already spans more than 70 regions and 400 data centers, supported by 275,000 miles of fiber and 190 network points of presence, along with employing 34,000 engineers dedicated to security.

To take on the cybersecurity problem at a hardware level, Microsoft moved from a centralized hardware security module model to its own Azure Integrated HSM.

The custom ASIC is designed to meet FIPS 140-3 Level 3 requirements, providing tamper resistance and local key protection within servers.

By embedding the chip in each system, cryptographic functions no longer need to pass through a centralized cluster, reducing latency while enabling tasks such as AES, PKE and intrusion detection locally.

ServeTheHome noted building an in-house chip required trade-offs. Instead of scaling hardware security modules at a cluster level, Microsoft had to size them for individual servers.

The result, the company argued, was a balance between performance, efficiency and resilience.

The tech giant also presented its “Secure by Design” architecture at Hot Chips, part of its Secure Future Initiative.

This includes Azure Boost, which offloads control plane services to a dedicated controller and isolates them from customer workloads, and the Datacenter Secure Control Module, which integrates Hydra BMC, and enforces a silicon root of trust on management interfaces.

Confidential computing, backed by trusted execution environments, extends protection to workloads in multi-tenant environments.

Caliptra 2.0, developed in collaboration with AMD, Google and Nvidia, anchors security in silicon and now incorporates post-quantum cryptography through the Adams Bridge project.

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Looking to access BBC Sounds – the BBC's podcast, radio and music app – from outside the UK? If you're visiting the US, Canada, Australia or indeed anywhere else, you can use a VPN – NordVPN works best – to unblock BBC Sounds and listen as normal.

We'll go into detail below and explain why the BBC's recent announcement that it would block international access to the BBC Sounds app saddened (and angered) many listeners around the world.

Here's a full (and quick) guide to how to get BBC Sounds from abroad...

International access to BBC Sounds was shut down on Monday, July 21.

Yes. UK residents will be able to continue accessing the BBC Sounds app from abroad with a VPN. We recommend Nord, which comes with a 30-day trial and over 70% off when you use our deal below...

If you're outside the UK at the moment and blocked from using BBC Sounds, you can still access the app thanks to the wonders of a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

The software allows your devices to appear as if they're back in your home country regardless of where in the world you are. So ideal for listeners away for work or on vacation wanting a taste of home.

NordVPN is our favorite:

NordVPN – get the world's best VPN
We regularly review all the biggest and best VPN providers and NordVPN is our #1 choice. It unblocked every streaming service in testing and it's very straightforward to use. Speed, security and 24/7 support available if you need – it's got it all.

The best value plan is the two-year deal, which sets the price at $3.39 per month and includes an extra 3 months absolutely FREE. There's also an all-important 30-day no-quibble refund if you decide it's not for you.

- So, try NordVPN 100% risk-free for 30 daysVIEW DEAL ON

Listeners based outside the UK can now access a limited selection of BBC audio programming via the BBC.com website and the BBC app (iOS / Android).

To put it mildly, however, they're nothing at all like BBC Sounds!

The only live services available through BBC.com and the BBC app are BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service English. They also host select podcasts, and news and history programming, such as Global News Podcast, You're Dead to Me and Infinite Monkey Cage.

Although you can listen via BBC.com and the BBC app without an account, you have to sign in on order to download, follow and save shows.

All, however, is not yet lost. You can still listen to BBC Radio stations from outside the UK by visiting their individual websites directly, through a web browser (links listed below).

It's a crude workaround, but it works.

However, these websites don't support key BBC Sounds features, such as the option to set a radio station as your alarm or even the ability to view a station's schedule.

Furthermore, only select radio content will be made available on-demand through the websites.

BBC Radio 1

BBC 1Xtra

BBC Radio 2

BBC Radio 3

BBC Radio 4 Extra

BBC Radio 5 Live

BBC Asian Network

BBC 6 Music

Click for more BBC Radio stations▼

BBC Live News

BBC Radio Scotland

BBC Radio Scotland Extra

BBC Radio Orkney

BBC Radio Shetland

BBC Radio nan Gaidheal

BBC Radio Ulster

BBC Radio Foyle

BBC Radio Wales

BBC Radio Wales Extra

BBC Radio Cymru

BBC Radio Cymru 2

Local radio

BBC Radio Berkshire

BBC Radio Bristol

BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

BBC Radio Cornwall

BBC CWR

BBC Radio Cumbria

BBC Radio Derby

BBC Radio Devon

BBC Essex

BBC Radio Gloucestershire

BBC Radio Guernsey

BBC Hereford & Worcester

BBC Radio Humberside

BBC Radio Jersey

BBC Radio Kent

BBC Radio Lancashire

BBC Radio Leeds

BBC Radio Leicester

BBC Radio Lincolnshire

BBC Radio London

BBC Radio Manchester

BBC Radio Merseyside

BBC Radio Newcastle

BBC Radio Norfolk

BBC Radio Northampton

BBC Radio Nottingham

BBC Radio Oxford

BBC Radio Sheffield

BBC Radio Shropshire

BBC Radio Solent

BBC Radio Solent Dorset

BBC Radio Somerset

BBC Radio Stoke

BBC Radio Suffolk

BBC Radio Surrey

BBC Radio Sussex

BBC Radio Tees

BBC Three Counties Radio

BBC Radio Wiltshire

BBC Radio WM

BBC Radio York

If you still can't access BBC Sounds, even with the aid of a VPN, there are a few more things you can try.

Make sure your BBC account is associated with a valid UK post code, such as W1A 1AA.

The BBC Sounds app (iOS / Android) won't appear in the Play Store or the App Store outside the UK, but you may be able to get around that by changing your phone's region in the settings menu.

The BBC, like most broadcasters and networks, is engaged in a neverending cat-and-mouse battle with VPN providers.

Although we've ranked the best iPlayer VPNs, something we've worked out through thorough testing, if one of them works today there's no guarantee the same will be true tomorrow, in which case you can raise the issue with your VPN provider's customer support team, and ask them to recommend the best server to connect to.

So what would compel the corporation to cut one of its most popular and beloved exports? The decision was taken without a consultation, and BBC management has rebuffed calls for an explanation to be provided.

For weeks following the announcement, Andrea Catherwood, the presenter of the BBC Radio 4 podcast Feedback, endeavoured to get a BBC spokesperson onto her show in order to justify the move, without success.

The move has been met with widespread anger and sadness, but above all disbelief. BBC Sounds doesn't just provide a connection to home for Brits living abroad, it's an invaluable purveyor of culture, education and entertainment, which has served as a key platform for musicians, artists and performers, some of whom owe their entire careers to radio.

BBC Sounds' demise has also caused a political storm in Ireland, where listeners north of the border retain full access to the app.

The memorandum of understanding agreed by the UK and Irish governments in 2010 stressed the importance of public service broadcasting on both sides of the border, for "promoting cultural diversity, in providing educational programming, in objectively informing public opinion, in guaranteeing pluralism."

The subject at the time was Irish-language channel TG4, with the MoU advocating its availability in Northern Ireland as well as the Republic of Ireland. However, listeners in the Republic of Ireland have now had their access to BBC Sounds blocked.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Encryption has been on a long journey, transcending centuries, from leather scrolls to quantum-resistant algorithms. But if we look at security requirements for businesses 25 years ago, the world was very different then. I sold encryption software back in 2000 when no one apart from the Government knew they needed it. It was free for home or personal use, so trying to sell encryption in a world where users borrowed it free of charge was tough.

One of the most notable examples at the time was OpenSSL, an open-source project that provided free encryption tools for securing internet communication. Another popular tool was PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), which had both free and commercial versions. The free version was widely used by privacy advocates, journalists, and tech-savvy users to encrypt emails and files.

However, eventually, public-key cryptography and tools like PGP started to gain traction for secure email and online communication. It was a pivotal moment as encryption moved from being a nice-to-have to becoming essential for privacy and trust online.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has also been in the mix for about 15 years. But it has been labelled as too complicated, requiring too much processing, too much disk space, being too slow and more.

But we’ve seen a breakthrough in FHE whereby customers are using it not just to encrypt data, but to query, decrypt and use it. They can also search data faster when it's encrypted than when it's not!

Without going into lengthy explanations as to how the integers (the raw material that makes encryption possible) and cryptographic algorithms work, in simple terms, it’s only the user who has access to and can understand and read the data. Where anyone else is concerned, the data is just garbage.

Why is this so important? If we look at how encryption tools work today, we create data, which we then encrypt. Every time we search, every time we move, we decrypt – because that’s the only way to make the data work for us. Once we have decrypted it, we must re-encrypt it to ensure it is safe. Therefore, we have multiple touch points where data, which we tell users is encrypted, isn’t encrypted.

This might be okay for data-at-rest, but once you migrate data from A to B, in many cases, we send the encryption keys with it. This is the equivalent of sending the keys to the castle with the castle. Also, the moment the user wants to do anything with that data (which is arguably when it is most useful) then all that safeguarding is gone.

Therefore, for us to be able to allow customers to use data whilst it still has a safety net around it and ensure data remains confidential is a huge leap forward. Most importantly, we don't have encryption keys travelling with the data; the keys are generated at the point of login.

Many in the industry advocate bootstrapping FHE as a workaround. This is a clever trick that allows encrypted data to be refreshed so it can be used in computations without becoming too noisy to decrypt. But it’s important to recognize both its promise and its challenges.

Done properly, bootstrapping has significant potential if implemented efficiently. It could unlock powerful capabilities in computation, especially in domains where data sensitivity is paramount.

However, bootstrapping remains computationally intensive. Even with optimized schemes, it can take seconds per operation, which means it cannot be used for real-time applications. Bootstrapping implementations are highly complex.

That said, dismissing bootstrapping outright may be premature. As research and engineering efforts continue - including our own - there’s reason to believe that more efficient, scalable implementations are within reach.

We live in a data-driven world, and FHE is going to be the key to enabling access to data and the use of technology like AI tools. However, I recently read an article in which Elon Musk discussed the fact that we’re running out of real-world data to train AI models.

This idea (often called the “peak data” theory) suggests that the internet no longer offers enough fresh, high-quality data to improve large AI models meaningfully.

In other words, we will hit a point where data is not going to develop in a way that is useful to organizations because of all the rules we put around it, some of which are self-imposed, others which are required by regulators.

Many regulations are vague, which means organizations will interpret these in a way that enables them to reduce risk by taking a more cautious approach. Other companies throw caution to the wind. We're seeing that play out in real-time.

Take Meta as an example. The company has faced multiple fines recently. The most notable in 2025 is a €200 million penalty from the European Commission under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The fine was issued because Meta’s “pay-or-consent” model, where users had to either pay for ad-free access or consent to data tracking, was found to violate users’ rights to genuine choice.

Regulators argued that this setup pressured users into giving up their data, undermining the DMA’s goal of fair digital competition.

I would argue that we must make data more usable, particularly where data helps make the world a better place. Clinical trials, for example, have faced challenges due to disparate data, which hampers progress. If a trial is quite niche, the organization needs to be able to get a decent data set to perform tests and analyze the results in a meaningful way.

We are helping organizations keep the data in the jurisdiction it is supposed to be in and still collaborate without moving the data around and without plain text data ever flying across the internet. This means we can make people's lives better; we can stop people dying of illnesses we could prevent because we understand more.

Of course, we want to be able to use data in a way that still respects privacy. This is where we see FHE being an enabler. We can have AI using data that is encrypted to make better decisions without affecting the underlying owner of the data from a user level. It's a brave new world – but an exciting one.

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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