Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson united warring Danish tribes through talk, and a millennium later, his nickname sits on the wireless chip in your earbuds. It's the kind of historical footnote that makes technology feel human. On the flip side, Bose is ditching Bluetooth and just launched wired noise-cancelling earbuds after a long wait. Finally, we have AI, and as usual, it’s grim out there. The latest victim? Teachers!

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Teachers at Multiverse, the £1.6 billion tech training company co-founded by Euan Blair, are reporting severe stress, sleepless nights, and a need for therapy after the company introduced an AI surveillance system that monitors, transcribes, and scores their online classroom sessions. The system tags each instructor with a risk status, calculates a confidence score, and flags potential problems for human managers to review, ranging from using too many filler phrases like "sort of" and "kind of" to failing to resolve a connectivity disruption within roughly a minute. Several instructors who spoke anonymously described the experience as "remorseless" and "unnerving," with one saying they had never before woken in the middle of the night from work-related stress.

The AI is trained to identify patterns across entire session transcripts rather than isolated moments, and instructs managers to apply negative marks even when a teacher self-corrects an unclear explanation. Teachers say the system has caused managers to flag them for alleged digressions when they were simply answering a student's question, and that the constant scrutiny shifts their attention away from learners and toward self-monitoring. Multiverse says the tool does not replace human judgment but directs managerial attention where it is most needed, and insists that only human managers write formal performance reviews. Pressure on Multiverse is likely to mount given that Ofsted earlier this year praised its instructors as skilled and effective even as it found the company fell short in other areas.

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Every time your wireless earbuds seamlessly latch onto your phone, you’re inadvertently tipping your hat to a 10th-century Viking king. The ubiquitous tech was christened after Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, a Danish monarch whose moniker likely stemmed from a dead, grayish-blue tooth. While Harald made history by unifying warring Scandinavian tribes under Christianity, tech giants in the late 1990s—Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia—faced their own fragmentation crisis. They desperately needed an open, short-range standard to bring wildly disparate devices into the same sandbox. Enter Intel engineer Jim Kardach.

Deep into Viking history, Kardach realized Harald’s knack for uniting rival factions mirrored their cross-brand wireless ambition. "Bluetooth" was pitched as a temporary internal codename. Naturally, corporate PR brass detested it, fretful that consumers would associate cutting-edge radios with gnarly dental hygiene. They scrambled for sanitized alternatives, but the moniker leaked first. The industry rolled with it, even binding the Younger Futhark runes for Harald’s initials—ᚼ (Hagall) and ᛒ (Bjarkan)—into that iconic blue emblem. Decades later, the founders playfully visited Denmark’s Jelling stone museum to apologize for co-opting the king’s identity. The museum granted them a 1,000-year extension. Honestly, given Harald’s taste for legend, he’d probably love the flex.

Bose has launched its new Noise Cancelling Wired Earbuds at $99, marking the audio brand's return to the wired earphone space with a decidedly modern feature set. The earbuds connect via USB-C and support USB Audio Class 2 protocol, delivering low-latency audio at 24-bit/48 kHz, a meaningful upgrade for listeners who care about audio fidelity. Bose's in-house QuietControl technology is onboard as well, giving users the ability to switch between standard listening, noise isolation, and an awareness mode comparable to transparency mode, all through physical inline controls that also handle volume and calls. The revival reflects a broader cultural shift back toward wired audio.

Bose president Raza Haider points to a "cultural renaissance" for wired earbuds, and the convenience argument is hard to dismiss: no pairing, no charging, no Bluetooth latency to contend with. The plug-and-play simplicity is positioned as one of the product's primary selling points, and it echoes sentiments that Audio-Technica veterans have also shared with Digital Trends about what's driving the trend. The Bose Noise Cancelling Wired Earbuds are available for pre-order now in four colors, black, white, smoke, and dewdrop mint, with open sales set to begin on October 15.

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