Tech
The Ricoh GR IV, the Cult Favorite Pocket Camera, Just Got Way Better
When I reviewed the GR III, I wrote about how much I liked snap focus mode, which allows you to set a predetermined focus distance regardless of the aperture. I set up my GR III to use autofocus when I half-pressed the shutter and snap when I quickly pressed, so that snap focus fired off the shot at my predetermined focus distance (usually 1.5 meters).
All that remains, but there is also now a dedicated letter, Sn, on the mode dial that sets the camera in Snap Focus mode, which allows you to dial in not only the distance you want focus at, but also the aperture you want to lock in. You can control the depth of field as well. I rather enjoyed this new mode and found myself shooting with it quite a bit.
Should You Get One?
The GR IV debuted at $1,497, which is significantly more than the GR III’s $999 price at launch. Is it worth the extra money? If you have a GR III and are frustrated by the autofocus, I think you will like the upgrade. It’s significant and, if you have the money, well worth it.
If you have any desire to use your pocket camera for video, this is not the one for you. See our guides to pocket cameras and the best travel cameras for some better, hybrid photo- and video-capable cameras. If you want an APS-C sensor that legitimately fits in your pocket, offers amazing one-handed control, and produces excellent images, the the Ricoh GR IV is for you.
Personally, I am holding out for the GR IVx, which will hopefully, like the GR IIIx, be the same camera with a 40mm-equivalent lens. At the time of writing, Ricoh would not comment on whether there will be a GR IVx.
I recently gave my OpenClaw a real robot arm to play with. The results just about blew my own neural network.
The AI agent was able to configure the arm, use it to see and slowly grab things, and even train another AI model to pick up and place specific objects. And they say AGI is still a few years away! (I’m joking, it probably is).
The results have me convinced that we may be on the brink of a robotics breakthrough. Training and controlling robots used to require considerable skill. Today’s AI models can make it almost easy.
“AI-powered coding is super exciting because it has the potential to bridge the gap between conventional engineering methods, which are reliable but don’t generalize, and contemporary vision-language-action models, which generalize but are not yet reliable,” says Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at UC Berkeley who is exploring the approach.
I bought a prebuilt arm called a LeRobot 101. It’s part of an open-source project from HuggingFace that makes it relatively cheap to start building and experimenting with robotics.
The LeRobot comes with two arms: a controller arm that a person operates using a handle and a trigger, and a follower arm with a camera that replicates those movements. You can train an AI model by teleoperating the controller arm and having the model learn how to move the follower in response to what it sees on the camera.
Building With OpenClaw
Before using OpenClaw, I spent several hours trying to connect and calibrate the robot, at one point nearly breaking the motors by applying the wrong settings, which caused them to overheat.
Then, with help from OpenClaw and Codex, I was able to vibe code a simple program that closed the claw’s gripper when it spotted a red ball. In the terminal, Codex went through the tricky work of configuring the connections to the robot. Then, with my help, it calibrated the positions of its joints. It also wrote a Python script that used several libraries to identify and grip the ball in question. Vibe-coding isn’t perfect of course, and hallucinations can introduce bugs especially when working with different hardware, but the results were impressive.
Tech
Spanish police ‘systematically’ hid cryptophone intercepts from courts, claims ex chief | Computer Weekly
A former police chief, who faces drug trafficking charges has claimed that Spanish drug investigators fabricated fictitious intelligence reports to hide their use of intercepted phone messages from the courts.
Former chief inspector Óscar Sánchez Gil, who is accused of running a drug trafficking operation, told a court that it was a “common and systematic practice” for Spanish drug investigators to withhold intercepted messages from judges.
The disclosures, if proved true, are likely to raise to questions over the use of intercepted phone messages from encrypted phone network Sky ECC and the FBI run encrypted phone network, Anom, in criminal prosecutions.
Giving evidence by video link from prison on 19 May 2026, Sánchez Gil, former head of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) claimed it was common practice to falsify the origin of information from intercepted messages by presenting them as tip-offs from overseas law enforcement agencies.
“Most of the information supposedly communicated by the [US Drugs Enforcement Agency] DEA, the [UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency] SOCA and [the UK’s National Crime Agency] NCA..is false. If is fabricated to conceal illicit sources of information or to protect informants,” he told Spain’s National Court.
The former police chief’s claims, first reported by the news website elDario.es, and confirmed to Computer Weekly by people present at the hearing, follow a series of international police operations to infiltrate encrypted phone networks used by organised crime groups.
Encrypted phone messages concealed from judges
Sánchez Gil, who previously worked in the Organised Crime and Drug Enforcement Unit (Udyco) said in video testimony that it was a “common and systematic practice” to maintain “absolute secrecy” about intelligence obtained through encrypted telephone networks.
Investigations and “relevant messages” would be concealed from judges and not included in police databases. In one case Sánchez Gil was involved in an operation to smuggle 1,600 kg of cocaine that were seized in Algeciras in May 2001.
He told Judge Francisco de Jorge, that information that led to the seizure was obtained from encrypted messages from the Anom encrypted phone network. Commanders concealed the role of Anom, by attributing the seizure to a tip-off from the Columbian Anti-Narcotics Directorate (Diran), which co-operated to create a fictitious intelligence report.
Police informers and collaborators protected
He said that when he was in the Anti Drug Unit, all information from encrypted phones that could implicate police informants or identify police that were collaborating with drug traffickers was “systematically concealed”.
Police officers from the Drugs and Organized Crime Unit, and Civil Guard and Customs Officers were among those protected.
He said that encrypted chat logs used in the case against him contained references to members of security forces but the information had not been analysed and had not been included by investigators in their reports to the judge.
In one case Police obtained information from the Sky ECC encrypted phone network that linked a drugs trafficker to a network under investigation. “They chose to conceal the source of the data and fabricated a report,” he said. The move was hidden from the prosecutors.
The former head of Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit, also claims that police installed a trojan on his mobile phone, which had been used to intercept messages sent on Signal, without proper judicial authorisation.
Sánchez Gil faces charges
Sánchez Gil, who was arrested in November 2023, is accused of supporting drug trafficking gangs from his position as head of the UDEF.
He is accused of opening fictitious investigations in police databases by entering the licence plate numbers of shipping containers that were about to enter shipping ports concealing drugs.
If another officer entered the same container number because they were genuinely investigating it, it would be flagged to Sánchez Gil who would alert the drug traffickers.
Impact on fair trials
Commenting on the case, defence lawyer, María Barbancho, said that if Sánchez Gil’s allegations were correct, it would have wider implications.
“It means the tribunal and the defence are working from a curated file — a record from which exculpatory material, and material inconvenient to the investigators, has been removed before anyone independent is able to examine it,” she wrote in a blog post.
Barbancho said the allegations raise questions about the right of people to have a fair trial, which requires defendants to be able to examine how evidence was produced.
“A police report whose stated origin is fabricated defeats that right at the very first step. A court cannot assess the lawfulness of an interception it has been told never happened,” she added.
Defence lawyers have challenged the use of intercepted evidence from networks including Sky ECC in prosecutions in Europe. The Court of Appeal of Basel-Stadt in Switzerland held in May that evidence from Sky ECC failed four grounds of legal admissibility.
Bulgaria’s national system integrator, Bulgaria Information Services (BIS) has deployed Google Cloud’s Cybershield service to enhance the eastern European country’s national cyber defence capabilities, one of the first such implementations of Cybershield in Europe, which it claims will position Bulgaria as a flagship for centralised, AI-powered cyber security.
Backed by funding from the European Union (EU) – reflecting a regional mandate to better secure the bloc’s eastern border – the project is designed to consolidate cyber intelligence and telemetry to enable BIS to reduce the mean time to detect and respond to threats to 54 Bulgarian government and public sector entities, moving from a reactive to a proactive posture.
“Our partnership with Google Cloud is the result of an eight-year relationship built on trust and technical excellence,” said Simeon Kartselyanski, cyber security manager at BIS and leader of Bulgaria’s National Cyber Security Operations Center.
“By integrating advanced AI-driven security operations and frontline threat intelligence, we are maturing our national defenses to protect Bulgaria’s digital resilience and critical infrastructure. This project serves as a model for how EU nations can utilise centralised capabilities to stay ahead of persistent adversaries.”
Federated SOC
With rapid, AI-driven evolution of cyber threats rendering many traditional defences obsolete, the collaboration will form a key plank of Bulgaria’s National Cyber Defence Strategy, which is seeking to address this challenge by setting up a federated, cross-body security operations centre (SOC).
As part of this centralised approach to cyber, BIS will use Google Cloud Security Operations and Google Threat Intelligence incorporating frontline insights from Mandiant, to enable the government bodies in scope to respond quickly and holistically, backed by Google Cloud’s secure-by-design infrastructure.
BIS said it would also benefit from specialist analyst capabilities to support it in detecting and neutralising complex intrusion scenarios, ultimately helping strengthen its own security expertise.
Boris Geogiev, Google Cloud director of central and eastern Europe, said: “Bulgaria is taking a leading role in European cyber security by executing a highly sophisticated, centralised defence strategy.
“Through Cybershield, we are helping Information Services transform Bulgarian national security from a manual craft into an automated science, fighting AI-powered threats with superior AI-powered defenses. We are proud to support Bulgaria as one of the first EU nations to deploy this integrated system of action.”
What is Cybershield?
Set up back in 2023 and previously known as Chronicle Cybershield, the service was developed as a government-specific product to help defend against disruptive and sophisticated adversaries, acknowledging that effective national cyber defence strategies call for essentially instantaneous knowledge sharing and unmatched situational awareness of the threat landscape.
It was created at least partly in response to the number of response efforts mounted by Mandiant on behalf of government bodies – which represented 25% of its investigations in 2022 compared to a mere 9% in 2021, a statistic that reflects the number of cyber attacks orchestrated by Russian state threat actors following the invasion of Ukraine.
Google Cloud Cybershield is already in use in a number of countries, among them Kuwait, where the Central Agency for Information Technology (CAIT) is working on a similar federated national SOC to that planned in Bulgaria.
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