Paul McCartney’s latest musical release is almost silent, but it’s making industry headlines for all the right reasons. Tech Brief 18 November 2025 explores a day of creative resistance, surveillance anxiety, and a bit of telecoms trivia. If you want to know what’s fuelling debates across tech circles, you’re in the right place. Missed yesterday’s Tech Brief? Catch up here before diving in.
Paul McCartney’s “Silent” Track Targets AI Copyright Loopholes
“Did you hear that? No, really, did you?” McCartney’s protest single, a nearly silent track, is a fresh kind of noise in today’s music scene. Released alongside acts like Kate Bush and Hans Zimmer, it directly protests the scraping of copyrighted works by AI companies, with no approval, no royalties, just machine learning run wild.
This track isn’t about nostalgia, but digital self-defence. We grew up on mixtapes and “Home Taping Is Killing Music” stickers, but nobody saw the day where silence itself would be deployed as a copyright weapon. Old media battles were full of hiss and pop; these days, even silence speaks volumes.
The user implication? Even cultural icons are drawing a line with creative defiance. It may be a cheeky concept, but the tension over AI and authorship isn’t quieting down.
Facial Recognition Tech Powers Real-World Arrests
Police in Surrey have just demonstrated the next phase of UK surveillance. With two arrests made using facial recognition from a mobile patrol van, what once sounded like pure 2000AD dystopia is parked right outside the local high street.
Anyone who remembers VHS cameras and the tabloid panic over “Big Brother” creeping into every corner will recognise the shift; now it’s a live-feed algorithm comparing faces at speed, opening questions about accuracy, consent, and fairness in real time. Techies will note this is not just a pilot, it’s operational, and the debate about oversight is only just starting.
The specifics are important, but there’s also that uneasy sense our city streets are shifting, one software upgrade at a time.
Chinese Investment Gave Access to UK Military-Grade Tech, Says BBC
What does foreign investment really buy? According to a BBC Panorama investigation, decades of Chinese financial activity in the UK unlocked backdoor routes to sensitive, military-grade technologies. Experts warn this is not just commercial; strategic assets, intellectual property, and even hard-won British R&D now look compromised.
This is not espionage as seen in films. Instead, complex deals and start-ups changing hands have made asset protection trickier than ever. The situation feels familiar to anyone who’s followed Britain’s long tradition of invention followed by international buy-outs or intellectual poaching. The only surprise is the sheer scale and subtlety.
As noted above in our story on surveillance, Britain’s place in the global tech race often means our trusted old kit has new eyes watching, whether close to home or far afield, and the stakes keep rising.
UK Investment Banks Lose £600,000 per Hour to IT Outages
A fact for Monday: UK investment banks face losses of £600,000 for every hour their IT infrastructure fails. Not millions, just six figures every single hour a critical system blinks out. Surveys cite persistent skills shortages and reluctance to retire legacy tech as key causes.
The details sting more because many NatWest mainframes and corporate systems still rely on decades-old kit. To be specific, plenty of these mainframes are still running IBM z/OS or even ancient VMS operating systems, which means the “steel-grey terminal” is not just a metaphor, it’s still there in the server rooms. Bankers are paying the price for refusing to dump creaky Cobol code and those stubborn terminals. Users see the knock-on effect every time a payment fails or a bank site glitches.
How far can stubbornness go before it takes the system with it? There’s no punchline, only the ongoing price of digital fragility.
From the Wayback Machine
On This Day: 1963 – The Bell System’s Touch-Tone phone officially launched in Pennsylvania, USA. The Western Electric 1500 model introduced DTMF, which stands for dual-tone multi-frequency signalling, replacing slow rotary pulse with a reliable keypad. John E. Karlin’s ergonomic layout remains the default for telephony, ATMs, and calculators. For anyone in the UK, it’s worth noting that British homes didn’t widely see touch-tone phones until BT rolled them out in the 1980s, so the sound of push-button dialling arrived a bit later here. These original principles still guide modern digital interfaces.
What This Means
Tech Brief 18 November 2025 highlights how today’s anxieties around copyright, security, and creaking infrastructure all stem from the same root: if you don’t shape technology, someone or something will shape it for you. Sometimes, all it takes is a silent track to make everyone pay attention.
Go on, dig out your old push-button phone. The feeling of real keys beats touchscreen silence, every time.
Missed yesterday’s Tech Brief? Catch up here
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