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Shark 'easy to use' vacuum has 40% off for a limited-time only on Amazon

Wales Online

34 minutes ago

Wales Online

Shark 'easy to use' vacuum has 40% off for a limited-time only on Amazon

Shark 'easy to use' vacuum has 40% off for a limited-time only on Amazon The Shark Upright Corded Vacuum cleaner is 40 per cent off on Amazon for a limited time, with the price slashed to £139 Shark maintains that the Shark Classic Upright Pet Vacuum traps 99.9% of dust and allergens within the vacuum (Image: Shark Clean) Shark is renowned for its exceptional vacuums and other appliances, and now a fresh deal on Amazon means customers can snap up a "brilliant" vacuum for just £139. The Shark Upright Corded Vacuum cleaner has 40 per cent knocked off on Amazon for a limited period - and compared to its standard RRP of £229.99, it could be a bargain too tempting to pass up. The Shark vacuum features two floor settings so users can toggle between carpet and hard floor modes using controls on the handle. Shark also maintains that it traps 99.9% of dust and allergens within the vacuum, preventing them from being released back into the atmosphere. READ MORE: Dunelm's 'statement' chair that looks designer now 75% off LATEST: Amazon slashes price of 'stylish and functional' £100 smartwatch to £23 It's also ideal for pet owners as it includes a Pet Tool, Crevice Tool and Upholstery Tool attachments. There's an extensive 8m power cable so Brits can extend into difficult-to-access spots and throughout the house. From superstar gigs to cosy pubs, find out What's On in Wales by signing up to our newsletter here . Shark offers a five-year guarantee on the appliance so if anything malfunctions, they will substitute it at no cost - provided they register it with Shark, reports the Mirror. And for those seeking alternatives, Amazon's Avalsor Cordless Vacuum Cleaner has been slashed from £189.99 to £95.45, though it may not deliver the same suction strength as the Shark Stratos. Meanwhile, the Hoover HF4 Hydro Pet Cordless Vacuum Cleaner With Anti Hair Wrap for £219 offers both hoovering and mopping functions in one gadget, courtesy of its interchangeable brush and mop attachments. The Shark vacuum cleaner boasts a 4.6-star rating out of five on Amazon. One satisfied customer shared: "Very happy with the product. I had never used a fancy vacuum cleaner like this one, having only used classical ones in the past (e.g., Henry or similar). "I had to find a vacuum cleaner that would fit behind the door in my room due to space constraints. Being detachable, I'm storing the base part separately and the upright part behind the door, so the door can open properly. "This way, I have it easily accessible as well. Just grab the two pieces, put them together in one click, and vacuum. In a maximum of 5 minutes, I'm done cleaning the carpet in my room. The Shark Upright Corded Vacuum cleaner has 40 per cent knocked off on Amazon for a limited period (Image: SHARK . GETTY) "It has strong suction, and the rotating brush is brilliant. It's light enough for me to manoeuvre easily. It is also very versatile and can be used in many setups, reaching into my drawers and not easily accessible corners and spots. It is just perfect. I never knew how practical these vacuum cleaners are. "I don't have pets, but the pet attachment is very useful, having a smaller rotating brush to fit tight spaces or stairs. Although the vacuum cleaner itself is not too noisy, the pet attachment is, due to the whistle effect, but it is not a major issue. All the same other attachments are good and practical." Some customers have expressed concerns about the size of the dust bag. One customer shared: "I really like the shark, it has no problem picking up the dog hair, and there's lots as I have three large dogs. It's versatile, and I love how you can take the container off the bottom bit to do the stairs easily. Article continues below "The little pet hair tool makes doing the stairs a doddle as it easily picks up dog hair. Neither rotation tool seems to get clogged up with dog hair either. But I have a couple of gripes, the container which holds the dust/dog hair is not big enough, so I'm emptying it very frequently."

Tech's trillion-dollar binge, Palantir's empire and women's privacy under attack

The Guardian

an hour ago

The Guardian

Tech's trillion-dollar binge, Palantir's empire and women's privacy under attack

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, tech companies are spending amounts of money that stretch the limits of the imagination. Donald Trump's administration is spending more money with data analytics and surveillance firm Palantir. And women on both sides of the Pacific face the extreme difficulty of keeping intimate moments private online. In last week's edition of the newsletter, my colleagues wrote about the upshot of Google's earnings call: lots of money earned, but, more importantly lots of money spent on AI. Even more money shelled out than previously expected: Google revised its predictions for how much it would invest in building up its AI capacity upwards by billions. Investors loved it. Shares up. In the ensuing week, three more tech giants reported their quarterly earnings – Meta, Microsoft and Amazon – and disclosed that they have collectively spent $155bn. Investors expressed elation at the colossal sums. Meta's market capitalization shot up by more than $130bn. Microsoft's valuation soared past $4tn, making the software giant the second publicly traded company to reach that stratospheric milestone. Amazon's financial outlook was murkier, and its shares went down. What a bummer to miss out on the AI stock party. The $155bn sum represents more than the US government has spent on education, training, employment and social services in the 2025 fiscal year so far. One economics research firm claims AI spending has contributed more to the US economy over the past two quarters than consumer spending, traditionally the biggest factor in economic growth. For the coming fiscal year, big tech's total capital expenditure is slated to balloon enormously, surpassing the already eye-popping sums of the previous year. Microsoft plans to unload about $100bn on AI in the next fiscal year, CEO Satya Nadella said. Meta plans to spend between $66bn and $72bn. Alphabet plans to spend $85bn, significantly higher than its previous estimation of $75bn. Amazon estimated that its 2025 expenditure would come to $100bn as it plows money into Amazon Web Services, which analysts now expect to amount to $118bn. In total, the four tech companies will spend more than $400bn on capex in the coming year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Read more about the gargantuan sums of money being spent on AI. Last week, the US army announced a new agreement with Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded, Alex Karp-run technology company. The agreement combined 75 separate, existing contracts between the army and Palantir into one, and allows for the possibility to purchase goods and services up to $10bn. It's just one of dozens of agreements between the company and the US, a relationship that's only been growing rapidly in the second Trump administration, though it had been on the rise before then. Palantir brought in $373m in revenue from US government contracts in just the first quarter of 2025 – $151.6m more than a year prior. The vast majority of that increase – $148.7m – came from government customers who were already working with the company, according to its earnings reports. Department: Defense Worth: The Department of Defense lists its 'obligations' to Palantir as $1.66bn in the government, which can encompass current and future spending, according to the US government's database of its own spending. Financial analysts estimate Palantir earns $400m in annual recurring revenue from the DoD. The details: The DoD remains Palantir's biggest and oldest customer within the US federal government. The first contract between the two dates back to 2008. The army has made no commitment and is under no obligation to purchase anywhere close to the $10bn figure listed as the value of its new agreement with Palantir, which represents the 'maximum potential value of the contract', according to the press release the government published. The number is not exactly money in hand for Palantir, but analysts seem encouraged it could represent a major source of revenue and more business from the US government. 'It's no obligation but we believe the army will spend billions with Palantir with this contract,' said Dan Ives, managing director at the wealth management firm Wedbush Securities. Department: Homeland Security Worth: $256.7m in obligations Details: The company has been working with the homeland security department since 2011. The vast majority of Palantir's contracts with DHS are to provide services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice. These amount to $248.3m in obligations. The company's most recent contract with Ice was for $30m to make the deportation process more efficient. Department: Health and Human Services Worth: $385m in obligations Department: Treasury Worth: $140.9m Department: Justice Worth: $204.5m Department: Energy Worth: $91m Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion Department: State Worth: $56.1m Department: Transportation Worth: $55.92m In the UK, Palantir has won a £330m contract with the National Health Service. On both sides of the Pacific Ocean, women are being confronted with the difficulty of keeping their most personal moments private online. In the US, an app that pledged to make IRL dating safer has suffered a breach that may imperil its users. In China, hundreds of thousands of men are sharing explicit pictures without the consent of the women in the photos. The app in the US, Tea, offered a forum for women who subscribed to share past experiences with men so that other women could conduct DIY background checks on their prospective dates, highlighting negative 'red flags' and positive 'green flags'. Tea's owners bill the app as 'the safest place to spill', in reference to the English slang term for gossip. It has topped US download charts in recent weeks, and the company has boasted about a user base of 1.6 million women. It is only available in the US. The app promised 'dating safety tools that protect women'. but in late July, the company discovered that hackers had breached its systems and leaked users' driver's licenses, direct messages and selfies. Users of the noxious message board 4Chan screenshotted and spread Tea users' personal information, according to NPR. A second breach exposed more than a million messages sent by Tea's users, including ones about sensitive topics like abortions or cheating, per 404 Media, which first reported both breaches. The company claimed in a statement that the first breach only affected users who had signed up before February 2024, but the second one was much more recent, 404 reported. In response to the hack, the app has suspended messaging entirely, the BBC reported. Most data breaches inspire little public uproar. The exposure of an email address here, a birthday there can feel commonplace. The breach of Tea is different. The app promised safety as a core feature. It delivered the opposite. The sine qua non of a whisper network like Tea is privacy, the ability to share damning information in secret, which the app failed to protect. Exposing users' identities and messages is the most basic type of failure, one that can be fatal to a product's reputation. To make matters worse, the breach offers red meat to the male-dominated 4Chan forum, a node of incel culture and men's rage in the US. 'Our team remains fully engaged in strengthening the Tea app's security, and we look forward to sharing more about those enhancements soon,' the company said in a statement to the BBC. 'In the meantime, we are working to identify any users whose personal information was involved and will be offering free identity protection services to those individuals.' In China, women are facing down an online legion of men dedicated to invading their most private moments with spy cameras and sharing the results on the internet. My colleague Amy Hawkins reports: Anger is growing on Chinese social media after news reports revealed the existence of online groups, said to involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, which shared photographs of women, including sexually explicit ones, taken without their consent. The Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published a report last week about a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram called 'MaskPark tree hole forum'. It said it had more than 100,000 members and was 'comprised entirely of Chinese men'. Men reportedly shared sexually explicit images of women either in intimate settings or with so-called 'pinhole cameras' that can be hidden in everyday items such as plug sockets and shoes. Read the full story. In an influential 2014 essay, 'Why women aren't welcome on the internet', the writer Amanda Hess said that receiving countless graphic death and rape threats in response to her work did not make her exceptional: 'It just makes me a woman with an internet connection.' Events of the past week indicate that Hess's headline still holds true. Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the world wide web, told the Guardian in 2020 that the internet 'is not working for women and girls'. The same year, a Unesco report found that 73% of women journalists endured online threats to their safety. Other UN reports have found that significant portions of women across the world, somewhere between 16% and 58%, face threats of gender-based violence online.

The Guardian

2 hours ago

The Guardian

Tech's trillion-dollar binge, Palantir's empire and women's privacy under attack

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, tech companies are spending amounts of money that stretch the limits of the imagination. Donald Trump's administration is spending more money with data analytics and surveillance firm Palantir. And women on both sides of the Pacific face the extreme difficulty of keeping intimate moments private online. In last week's edition of the newsletter, my colleagues wrote about the upshot of Google's earnings call: lots of money earned, but, more importantly lots of money spent on AI. Even more money shelled out than previously expected: Google revised its predictions for how much it would invest in building up its AI capacity upwards by billions. Investors loved it. Shares up. In the ensuing week, three more tech giants reported their quarterly earnings – Meta, Microsoft and Amazon – and disclosed that they have collectively spent $155bn. Investors expressed elation at the colossal sums. Meta's market capitalization shot up by more than $130bn. Microsoft's valuation soared past $4tn, making the software giant the second publicly traded company to reach that stratospheric milestone. Amazon's financial outlook was murkier, and its shares went down. What a bummer to miss out on the AI stock party. The $155bn sum represents more than the US government has spent on education, training, employment and social services in the 2025 fiscal year so far. One economics research firm claims AI spending has contributed more to the US economy over the past two quarters than consumer spending, traditionally the biggest factor in economic growth. For the coming fiscal year, big tech's total capital expenditure is slated to balloon enormously, surpassing the already eye-popping sums of the previous year. Microsoft plans to unload about $100bn on AI in the next fiscal year, CEO Satya Nadella said. Meta plans to spend between $66bn and $72bn. Alphabet plans to spend $85bn, significantly higher than its previous estimation of $75bn. Amazon estimated that its 2025 expenditure would come to $100bn as it plows money into Amazon Web Services, which analysts now expect to amount to $118bn. In total, the four tech companies will spend more than $400bn on capex in the coming year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Read more about the gargantuan sums of money being spent on AI. Last week, the US army announced a new agreement with Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded, Alex Karp-run technology company. The agreement combined 75 separate, existing contracts between the army and Palantir into one, and allows for the possibility to purchase goods and services up to $10bn. It's just one of dozens of agreements between the company and the US, a relationship that's only been growing rapidly in the second Trump administration, though it had been on the rise before then. Palantir brought in $373m in revenue from US government contracts in just the first quarter of 2025 – $151.6m more than a year prior. The vast majority of that increase – $148.7m – came from government customers who were already working with the company, according to its earnings reports. Department: Defense Worth: The Department of Defense lists its 'obligations' to Palantir as $1.66bn in the government, which can encompass current and future spending, according to the US government's database of its own spending. Financial analysts estimate Palantir earns $400m in annual recurring revenue from the DoD. The details: The DoD remains Palantir's biggest and oldest customer within the US federal government. The first contract between the two dates back to 2008. The army has made no commitment and is under no obligation to purchase anywhere close to the $10bn figure listed as the value of its new agreement with Palantir, which represents the 'maximum potential value of the contract', according to the press release the government published. The number is not exactly money in hand for Palantir, but analysts seem encouraged it could represent a major source of revenue and more business from the US government. 'It's no obligation but we believe the army will spend billions with Palantir with this contract,' said Dan Ives, managing director at the wealth management firm Wedbush Securities. Department: Homeland Security Worth: $256.7m in obligations Details: The company has been working with the homeland security department since 2011. The vast majority of Palantir's contracts with DHS are to provide services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice. These amount to $248.3m in obligations. The company's most recent contract with Ice was for $30m to make the deportation process more efficient. Department: Health and Human Services Worth: $385m in obligations Department: Treasury Worth: $140.9m Department: Justice Worth: $204.5m Department: Energy Worth: $91m Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion Department: State Worth: $56.1m Department: Transportation Worth: $55.92m In the UK, Palantir has won a £330m contract with the National Health Service. On both sides of the Pacific Ocean, women are being confronted with the difficulty of keeping their most personal moments private online. In the US, an app that pledged to make IRL dating safer has suffered a breach that may imperil its users. In China, hundreds of thousands of men are sharing explicit pictures without the consent of the women in the photos. The app in the US, Tea, offered a forum for women who subscribed to share past experiences with men so that other women could conduct DIY background checks on their prospective dates, highlighting negative 'red flags' and positive 'green flags'. Tea's owners bill the app as 'the safest place to spill', in reference to the English slang term for gossip. It has topped US download charts in recent weeks, and the company has boasted about a user base of 1.6 million women. It is only available in the US. The app promised 'dating safety tools that protect women'. but in late July, the company discovered that hackers had breached its systems and leaked users' driver's licenses, direct messages and selfies. Users of the noxious message board 4Chan screenshotted and spread Tea users' personal information, according to NPR. A second breach exposed more than a million messages sent by Tea's users, including ones about sensitive topics like abortions or cheating, per 404 Media, which first reported both breaches. The company claimed in a statement that the first breach only affected users who had signed up before February 2024, but the second one was much more recent, 404 reported. In response to the hack, the app has suspended messaging entirely, the BBC reported. Most data breaches inspire little public uproar. The exposure of an email address here, a birthday there can feel commonplace. The breach of Tea is different. The app promised safety as a core feature. It delivered the opposite. The sine qua non of a whisper network like Tea is privacy, the ability to share damning information in secret, which the app failed to protect. Exposing users' identities and messages is the most basic type of failure, one that can be fatal to a product's reputation. To make matters worse, the breach offers red meat to the male-dominated 4Chan forum, a node of incel culture and men's rage in the US. 'Our team remains fully engaged in strengthening the Tea app's security, and we look forward to sharing more about those enhancements soon,' the company said in a statement to the BBC. 'In the meantime, we are working to identify any users whose personal information was involved and will be offering free identity protection services to those individuals.' In China, women are facing down an online legion of men dedicated to invading their most private moments with spy cameras and sharing the results on the internet. My colleague Amy Hawkins reports: Anger is growing on Chinese social media after news reports revealed the existence of online groups, said to involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, which shared photographs of women, including sexually explicit ones, taken without their consent. The Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published a report last week about a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram called 'MaskPark tree hole forum'. It said it had more than 100,000 members and was 'comprised entirely of Chinese men'. Men reportedly shared sexually explicit images of women either in intimate settings or with so-called 'pinhole cameras' that can be hidden in everyday items such as plug sockets and shoes. Read the full story. In an influential 2014 essay, 'Why women aren't welcome on the internet', the writer Amanda Hess said that receiving countless graphic death and rape threats in response to her work did not make her exceptional: 'It just makes me a woman with an internet connection.' Events of the past week indicate that Hess's headline still holds true. Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the world wide web, told the Guardian in 2020 that the internet 'is not working for women and girls'. The same year, a Unesco report found that 73% of women journalists endured online threats to their safety. Other UN reports have found that significant portions of women across the world, somewhere between 16% and 58%, face threats of gender-based violence online.

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Shark 'easy to use' vacuum has 40% off for a limited-time only on Amazon

Tech's trillion-dollar binge, Palantir's empire and women's privacy under attack

Tech's trillion-dollar binge, Palantir's empire and women's privacy under attack

Google Fitbit Charge 6 falls to cheapest price ever on Amazon

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Shark 'easy to use' vacuum has 40% off for a limited-time only on Amazon

Tech's trillion-dollar binge, Palantir's empire and women's privacy under attack

Tech's trillion-dollar binge, Palantir's empire and women's privacy under attack

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