Bar chart of what Brazil's 1,423 AI-made election posts were for: promotion 786, attack 360, humour or satire 264, informative 31

Tech 26 October 2026

Who made Brazil's election AI posts? More than a third came from the candidates' own accounts

Fact-checker Agência Lupa's VigIA monitor confirmed 1,423 political posts made or altered with AI between 16 August and 22 October. About 54% carried no label, even though Brazil's electoral rules require one.

Brazil’s presidential runoff ended on Sunday with Lula re-elected. It also closed the most AI-heavy campaign the country has seen, and the data on who made that content is not what most people would guess.

Agência Lupa’s VigIA monitor reviewed 1,486 suspect posts between 16 August and 22 October and confirmed that 1,423 had been made or altered with AI. The figures are in the project’s third interim report, published the day before the vote.

Not just anonymous accounts

The common assumption is that election AI comes from fake profiles. Of the 1,423 pieces, 548 came from the candidates’ own official accounts, more than a third. Another 560 came from ordinary voters and activists, and only 300 from anonymous accounts or avatars.

Most of it was not even aimed at a rival. More than half (786 posts) promoted a candidacy, showing candidates in flattering work settings or plugging rallies. Attacks on opponents numbered 360, and humour or satire 264.

The missing label

Brazil’s electoral court requires any campaign material made or altered with AI to say so, and bans deepfakes outright. In practice only 655 posts carried any label: 352 added by the authors, 300 by the platforms and 3 by both. The other 768, about 54%, went out unmarked.

And half of the total (716) was classed as deepfake, or deepfake mixed with other synthetic material, which is exactly the category that is banned.

Where it spread

Instagram accounted for 794 cases and Facebook for 690 (the same piece can appear on both). Lula featured in 508 items and Flávio Bolsonaro in about 247.

One footnote worth adding. The report’s opening line says there was almost one manipulated post every hour. By the study’s own count the average was 20.9 a day, a little under one an hour. It does not change the conclusion. It just shows the numbers reward reading to the end.

By Oliver Grant

Chart: Tugadaily, data from Agência Lupa

Tech 25 October 2026

Greece will keep under-15s off social media from January. Platforms, not parents, carry the can

Greek MPs passed the law overnight on 22-23 October, banning social media for children under 15 from 1 January 2027. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok must check every user's age, existing accounts included, and the state's Kids Wallet is one of the tools they can use.

Greece has gone from plan to statute. Parliament passed a ban on social media for children under 15 overnight on 22-23 October, and it takes effect on 1 January 2027. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis first floated the idea in April. Now it has a start date and someone on the hook. It passed on a majority vote. Governing New Democracy backed it, PASOK abstained, and SYRIZA, the Communist Party and other opposition parties voted against. The most…

BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk being interviewed on a video games TV set

Tech 24 October 2026

EA is shutting BioWare and cancelling the next Mass Effect

In a staff letter published on 21 October, Electronic Arts said it would not continue the early-stage Mass Effect project and is closing BioWare and its Edmonton workspace. The wider cut is reported at around 400 jobs, about 3% of staff; The Sims' Project Lotus is paused and the skate. team gets smaller.

Electronic Arts is closing BioWare. The decision came in a staff letter from chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber, which EA published on 21 October. It says a small BioWare team had been working on early development of a new Mass Effect, and that EA has decided not to move forward with it, which means closing the studio and its Edmonton workspace. The letter itself calls BioWare a legendary studio that helped define the…

Two hands holding the iPhone Duo open, its folding inner screen showing the home screen

Tech 23 October 2026

Apple's folding iPhone Duo is now in Portuguese shops, from €2,399

The first foldable iPhone went on sale in Portugal on Friday 23 October in four storage sizes priced from €2,399 to €3,899. In the US, online delivery dates slipped to late January within hours of pre-orders opening.

The iPhone Duo, Apple's first phone that folds in half, has been on sale in Portuguese shops since Friday 23 October. The 256GB model is €2,399 on Apple's Portuguese store, and the price climbs quickly from there. There are four sizes. 512GB costs €2,649, 1TB is €3,149, and the 2TB version reaches €3,899. Both colours, star white and night sky, cost the same. Open, the Duo has a 7.6-inch screen. Closed, it runs on a 5.4-inch outer display with the same…

Three engineers leaning over a laptop next to an industrial robotic arm in a workshop

Tech 26 September 2026

Portugal wants to teach AI to 100,000 SME workers. It starts in October, at a mould factory in Marinha Grande

The first pilot launches in October in the Leiria region, with around 100 workers, while a second tests AI inside five or six mould-making factories in Marinha Grande. The national target is 100,000 SME workers, backed by over €400 million already paid out through IFIC and another €800 million reprogrammed from the PRR recovery fund.

Portugal already had a €400 million plan for artificial intelligence, announced back in June. What it lacked was a date and an address. Now it has both. The Minister of Economy and Territorial Cohesion, Manuel Castro Almeida, told Parliament the goal is to train 100,000 workers at small and medium-sized businesses in artificial intelligence — and that the first pilot launches as soon as October, in the Leiria region, with around 100 workers from various…

Tech 25 September 2026

TEKEVER is now worth $6.4 billion, after raising another $580 million

The Series D is led by UC Investments, making its first direct investment in Europe, and Baillie Gifford. In August the talk was of about €500 million at a €5.5 billion valuation; it closed at almost exactly those terms.

TEKEVER, the autonomous-systems company founded in Portugal, has closed the first tranche of a $580 million Series D round, valuing the business at $6.4 billion. The company confirmed the figures itself, with UC Investments (the University of California's fund, making its first direct investment in Europe) and Scottish investment manager Baillie Gifford leading the round.

Official Lisbon AI Week poster, with the dates 21 to 27 September 2026

Tech 24 September 2026

Half of Observador's visits used to come from Google. That traffic is now shrinking

At Lisbon AI Week, Observador general director Rudolf Gruner said roughly half the paper's visits came through Google tools, and that share is falling as AI answers people directly. The homepage, over 60% of page views in 2014, is now under 20%.

Lisbon AI Week is running across the city through Sunday, with dozens of events from hackathons to debates on creativity, health and security. At one of them, on AI and the media, a newspaper boss did something AI panels rarely do: he put his own numbers on the table. Rudolf Gruner, general director of Observador, said roughly half of the paper's visits used to arrive through Google's tools (Search, Discover and Google News). That traffic is now falling.…

Tech 22 September 2026

Spain has handed data centres about 12 GW of grid access. Its own 2030 plan asked for four

A draft royal decree would force data centres to cover 80% of every hour's electricity with newly built renewables. The industry puts nine billion euros at risk and names Portugal as the alternative. The reason for the clampdown is in the decree's own preamble.

The short version doing the rounds this week is easy enough: Spain tightened the rules on data centres, and the industry is threatening to move to Portugal. The long version is sitting in the document nobody opened, and it is considerably more interesting. Spain's ecological transition ministry has put out for public hearing a draft royal decree setting energy, environmental and digital sovereignty requirements on any installation above 1 MW. The…

An open Pixel 11 Pro Fold showing American Sign Language being translated into text on screen, with the ASL label above the translated sentence

Tech 20 September 2026

Which sign language does the Pixel 11 read? American, and only American

Google's sign-to-text feature turns ASL into written English. Portuguese Sign Language is not part of it, and a month after the Portuguese launch there is still no per-feature language list for the rest of Gemini.

When the Pixel 11 reached Portuguese shops in August, one question went unanswered: does the artificial intelligence that fills the whole presentation actually work in Portuguese? For one feature there is now an answer, and it is narrower than the launch suggested. Sign-to-text, sold as one of the range's headline accessibility wins, reads American Sign Language and writes English. This is not a market rollout waiting on a switch somewhere. It is how the…

Opening artwork from Hacktron AI's research post titled Hacking OpenAI

Tech 19 September 2026

The people who broke into OpenAI's internal code spent less than 3,000 dollars doing it

OpenAI closed the hole fourteen hours after it was reported and paid a 6,500 dollar bounty. The figure that matters to anyone running a website is the cost: a two-month campaign that also probed Slack and Meta ran on under 3,000 dollars of tokens.

The version of this story that travelled was the catchy one: a team used one AI lab's model to get inside another AI lab. That is documented and true. The detail worth your attention if you run a website sits halfway down the report instead. Start with what happened. On 25 July, three researchers at a security startup called Hacktron AI reached OpenAI staff accounts and, through them, an internal code repository. To prove the access without reading…

Zunder's ultra-fast charging station beside the A8 at Caldas da Rainha, with a photovoltaic canopy over the chargers

Tech 18 September 2026

12 fast chargers just opened on the A8, and 2 of them fit a lorry

Zunder's station at junction 19, outside Caldas da Rainha, went live on 11 September with 400 kW CCS points and a solar canopy. The bays sized for heavy vehicles are the first public ones in Portugal.

If you drive an electric car between Lisbon and Porto, range has quietly stopped being a conversation. If you drive an electric lorry, it is most of the conversation, because until this month there was nowhere public in Portugal to stop halfway and put charge back into a heavy vehicle. The station the Spanish operator Zunder opened on 11 September at Caldas da Rainha is the first answer to that, on a modest scale. It sits at junction 19 of the A8, beside…

A Vega-C rocket lifting off at night from Kourou in French Guiana carrying the FLEX and Sentinel-3C satellites

Tech 17 September 2026

ESA's new FLEX satellite measures photosynthesis from 814 kilometres up

It went up on a Vega-C from Kourou on 15 September, the first satellite built specifically to measure photosynthesis. It flies at 814km, has three and a half years of life and revisits the same spot every 27 days.

A struggling plant does not change colour on the day it starts struggling. It slows down internally first, and the leaf gives the game away weeks later. Catching that earlier stage is the whole reason the European Space Agency put a satellite up this week. It is called FLEX, and it launched on 15 September aboard a Vega-C from Kourou in French Guiana, on flight VV30. It had company. Copernicus Sentinel-3C rode the same rocket, sitting on top of the launch…

Tech 16 September 2026

Portugal's biggest telecoms operator was knocked over three times in one night by a DDoS attack

MEO says the outages were a distributed denial-of-service attack and that no data was accessed. Under the cybersecurity regime in force since April, the operator now owes a 24-hour notification, a 72-hour update and a final report within 30 working days.

If your internet and television dropped out three separate times between Monday night and Tuesday morning, that was not a fault on the line. MEO's own technical analysis points to a distributed denial-of-service attack aimed at its infrastructure, with enough traffic thrown at it to congest the network and degrade service temporarily. The operator was precise about two things. Nobody got into the data, its own or its customers'. And the instability in BGP…

Tech 13 September 2026

Three AI rivals agreed to slow down. The US president took a day to disagree

Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday arguing the industry should pace itself, with a three-step plan. Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed it within hours. On Sunday Donald Trump called the people asking for it negative forces.

On Saturday the chief executive of Anthropic published a roughly 3,800-word essay arguing that the artificial intelligence industry should deliberately slow the rate at which it improves model capabilities. Within hours, two competitors who agree with him on almost nothing said he was right. The essay is called We Must Pace the Frontier and it sits on Dario Amodei's personal site. It sets out three steps. The first is giving outside evaluators permanent,…

Chart showing the split of fixed broadband accesses in Portugal by speed in the second quarter of 2026

Tech 11 September 2026

What speed is home internet in Portugal? As of this quarter, mostly a gigabit

Portugal closed the second quarter of 2026 with 4.9 million fixed broadband lines. Connections at 1 Gbps or faster overtook the 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps tier for the first time.

Something quiet happened in the regulator's quarterly figures. At the end of June, fixed internet connections running at 1 Gbps or more made up 47.4% of the total, against 46.9% for those between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. It is the first time the top tier has come out in front. For years it was the small slice. Now it is the biggest one. Portugal ended the second quarter with 4.9 million fixed broadband accesses, 102,000 more than a year earlier, a rise of…