Google worker ‘used internal data to make money on bets’, Monzo muscles in on mobile market

A Google employee has been arrested for allegedly using his access to company information to successfully place lucrative bets on the prediction platform Polymarket. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York said it had charged Michele Spagnuolo, a Google engineer, with breaking insider trading laws because of several bets he placed through the platform. Although Spagnuolo is an Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, he was arrested on Wednesday and brought before a federal judge in New York. BBC 

Digital bank Monzo is muscling into the mobile market by launching a phone plan that gets cheaper the longer a customer stays. Customers of the bank can join a waiting list for the mobile service that is built on the Virgin Media O2 network and will be rolled out in the summer. Monzo’s entry to the market is set to intensify competition among phone providers which are already being challenged by newer players such as Revolut and Klarna. Yahoo Finance!

After 88 days of near-total internet blackout in Iran, long-delayed messages, images and poems flooded phones and social media feeds at about 5pm on Tuesday, when still-limited connectivity flickered back to life. The first reactions, however, were not celebratory. Many new posts were threaded with scepticism, anxiety and anger. Ellie*, 42, an artist from Tehran, was able to connect for the first time since 28 February. “I lit a cigarette, played SoundCloud and listened to our favourite music,” she said. The Guardian 

Ultrahuman is branching out – the smart ring company just unveiled the Ultrahuman Photon, a red light therapy device, which is currently on pre-order. You can visit the official site and reserve a unit for $249 – that’s less than half of what a typical red light therapy device costs, says the company. You can read more about red light therapy over at Scientific American and Nature. It has been found to assist with post-exercise comfort and muscle recovery as well as improving skin health. GSM Arena 

Nasa announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a $20bn moon base, and said it had chosen the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to conduct the first. The revelation by Nasa’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, at a press conference in Washington DC marked the first detailed public explanation of how and when the moon base will be built. The Guardian 

An interesting feature of the AI revolution is how negative we feel about it. When you consider the potential, it is surprising how focused we are on the cloud around the silver lining. It is eating our jobs; the economic benefits will never justify the massive investment; it takes away what makes us truly human. There is nothing new about this. From Luddites smashing looms to laws requiring red flags in front of cars, people have always leant towards the status quo and worried about the consequences of innovation. Telegraph 

The Sony Bravia 9 II might be the most trailed TV in history. I originally saw it in prototype form – before it even had a name – in Sony’s Tokyo HQ in February last year, and I wrote about how impressive it was a short time later. I then saw it again in March this year, but I had to sit on that until last month, when Sony announced that its first RGB Mini LED TVs would be arriving this year, under the name ‘True RGB’. WhatHiFi