GoKawiil
Tech News
A university president outlines six principles meant to help institutions resist political pressure on research funding, peer review and academic autonomy, citing examples from the United States and Hungary. The piece traces how funding cuts, shifting grant priorities and legal campaigns against institutions like Central European University have already eroded independent scholarship in some countries.
A researcher at Slovenia's InnoRenew Centre of Excellence describes winning a nearly €2 million European Research Council grant to develop self-repairing, UV-protective fungal-biofilm coatings for buildings. The five-year award, secured after a lengthy application and resubmission process, immediately reshaped the scope of her research group's work and her own daily responsibilities, shifting her focus from hands-on experiments toward managing people and projects.
A traveler returning from a trip through France, Spain and Portugal reports that Dynamic Currency Conversion, the practice of letting merchants bill purchases in a tourist's home currency instead of the local one, has become harder to avoid. Many payment terminals now default to charging in dollars automatically, often without a clear prompt asking the customer to choose, making it easy to unknowingly accept a worse exchange rate.
Acer has revived the Packard Bell brand at IFA 2026, unveiling a colorful new consumer tech lineup that ditches the beige, CRT-era aesthetics of the 1990s. The relaunch centers on a 'Tech it easy' tagline, emphasizing affordable, simple-to-use devices rather than premium or niche products. Acer confirmed the new Packard Bell products will only be sold in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, leaving out the US market where the brand originally built its reputation.
Google announced a 13 billion euro ($15.1 billion) investment to build out AI infrastructure in Finland, making it the company's largest single investment ever made in Europe. The move underscores Finland's growing appeal to hyperscalers seeking abundant land and power resources that are increasingly scarce elsewhere on the continent.
Google has signaled it will scale back certain search functionality for European users rather than fully comply with EU antitrust rules, aiming to sidestep potential fines. The company frames this as a response to regulatory demands it considers overly burdensome or conflicting with its business model.
Right to Repair Europe examined 2,334 smartphone model records in the EU's Product Registry for Energy Labelling and found that only about 18 percent link to a working page with spare-parts prices or repair instructions, a year after the rules took effect. Roughly half the entries leave the required URL blank, and 19 percent point to unrelated pages, while some manufacturers still award themselves top repairability grades despite the missing information.
Dutch developer Peter Ullrich is building Pushin.eu, a Git hosting platform designed to keep code and data entirely within Europe. The service is currently in invite-only beta, with general availability planned for early 2027, and will eventually charge subscription fees comparable to GitHub and GitLab.
Quad9, a free public DNS recursive resolver service focused on blocking malicious domains, has reorganized its operations to be based in Switzerland, citing the country's strong privacy laws. Industry figures from organizations including the Center for Democracy and Technology, ProtonMail, RIPE, and Alta Associates praised the move as a step toward diversifying and strengthening privacy protections in core internet infrastructure.
A Nature opinion piece argues that European doctoral programs should learn from China's emphasis on practical, industry-relevant PhD training without directly copying its system. The author contends Europe needs to adapt such approaches to fit its own academic and economic context rather than importing them wholesale.
The European Commission is preparing Chips Act 2.0 to fix flaws in its 2023 semiconductor strategy, which aimed for a 20 percent global production share by 2030 but is on track for only about 11.7 percent. The new plan will add demand-side measures like public procurement and industrial coordination to spur chip investment, even as the EU's own AI factories and data centers rely almost entirely on advanced processors designed in the U.S. and manufactured in Asia.
At Copenhagen's TechBBQ conference, founders and investors repeatedly returned to questions of AI sovereignty, spurred by an earlier incident where Anthropic's models Mythos and Fable became unavailable to users outside Europe. Attendees debated whether Europe should build and own its own AI infrastructure rather than depend on U.S. and Chinese providers, with reactions ranging from serious concern to relative indifference.