About Daily Tech IQ

I built Daily Tech IQ because technology is moving faster than ever, faster than anyone can keep up with. The idea is simple: Raise your TechIQ by spending just 5 minutes a day on one trending story worth reading and five questions worth answering, every day. This page says plainly how each part is made and how it is labelled.

Technology explained by AI. Challenged by humans.

AI does much of the repeatable work here: reading the sources, drafting news summaries and the “My Read” commentary, helping to write and check quiz questions, and a large share of the engineering. Readers challenge what we publish, in the open, with their reasoning and evidence. Anyone can report a mistake, and we correct it where you can see.

I decide what this site should do and why it matters. AI helps to build much of it. But AI doesn’t get the final say. People do. Where a part of the site is checked by software rather than by a person, the sections below say so.

AI and editorial oversight

Daily Tech IQ uses AI to assist with research and drafting, under human editorial oversight. AI helps read and summarise sources and drafts the news summaries and the My Read commentary. A person reads, edits where needed and approves each news story, My Read included, before it goes live, and I am responsible for what is published. Quiz questions are drafted and checked with AI too; how they are verified is described under “How the quiz is made”.

What you are reading

Every story carries a label that says what it is. The label is set by the kind of story, not typed by hand, so one kind can’t be dressed up as another.

• News is an AI-assisted summary of the linked sources. It is shown as coming from the Daily Tech IQ news desk, never from a named person.
• Analysis and Opinion are written, or approved word for word, by a named person, who is shown as the author. Nothing an automated process writes can be published as analysis or opinion.
• A stand-alone My Read piece is the one exception: original opinion published under the Daily Tech IQ name as My Read, with no personal byline, labelled Opinion and marked as original commentary. Like the commentary in a news story, it is written in the first person. It is written, or approved word for word, by me, never by an automated process.

How news stories are made

Each day a program reads the public feeds of the outlets listed below, plus Hacker News and Techmeme, and picks a story that several outlets are covering. A news story on this site has two parts, and they are labelled so you can tell them apart:

• What the reporting says. A short summary, in our own words, of what a named outlet reported, followed by a clear link to read the original reporting. It tells you the outlet and the article, and it is not a substitute for reading them.
• My Read. Commentary on the story: what matters and what to watch next. It is opinion, not reporting. It is written in the first person, in the site’s house voice: drafted with AI assistance or written by me, then read and approved by me before the story goes live.

Automatic checks reject a draft that repeats a run of words from a source, that quotes more than three words, that borrows the wording of a source’s headline, that uses a number that is not in the sources, or that cites a link that was not in the material it was given. Stories about a legal allegation, a security incident or a company’s finances need more sources than that, or a primary one. These checks reduce the chance of copying and of getting a fact wrong. They do not guarantee either, which is why a person reads each story.

A person reads each news story before it goes live, can edit the draft, and has to confirm that they compared it with the sources before it can be published. The first stories, published before 22 October 2026, went live before this step existed and were written in an older format that summarised the story at greater length; each has since been read and approved by a person.

Every news story lists the articles it is based on, with links, and says how widely the story was covered when that was measured. If you want the full account, follow the links to the outlets that did the work.

Our news reader

We would rather send readers to the people who did the reporting than stand in for them. So the program that reads the news is built to be a considerate visitor, and this section says exactly what it does.

• Who it is. It identifies itself as ZaterraLabsNewsBot and links to this section. It runs once a day.
• What it reads. The public feed of each outlet below, for headlines, short summaries and links. For a few articles about the story it picks, it may read a short excerpt (at most 1,200 characters) so that a summary is accurate. It does not sign in, and it does not get around a paywall.
• When it will not read. Before it reads any article page it asks the site’s robots.txt file. If the file disallows it, can’t be read, or the answer is unclear, it does not read the article, and the story is drafted from the feed alone.
• What happens to the excerpt. It is held in memory for the length of the daily run, shown to the AI model, and thrown away. It is not saved, published or syndicated. What we keep is a record of which pages were allowed and how much was read.
• How to stop it. To keep it out, add User-agent: ZaterraLabsNewsBot and Disallow: / to your robots.txt. Or tell us and we will stop reading your site.

A robots.txt file that allows a visit is not permission to republish, and we don’t treat it as one. We have not yet reviewed each outlet’s terms of service. Our stories do not reproduce an outlet’s text; they summarise it in our own words and send you to the original.

The outlets whose feeds it checks are:

TechCrunch, The Verge, Ars Technica, Wired, Gizmodo, Slashdot, NPR Technology, MIT Technology Review, BleepingComputer, BBC Technology, IEEE Spectrum, VentureBeat, Engadget, The Guardian Technology, The Register, ZDNET, InfoQ, The New Stack, Krebs on Security, CISA Advisories, NASA, Phys.org Technology.

Corrections and updates

When a story changes after it is published, the story says so in an update history at the bottom: the date, and what changed in a sentence a reader can follow. We don’t quietly edit published stories. To report a mistake, use Contact.

How the quiz is made

Each quiz has five multiple-choice questions. A quiz is served only when all five questions are marked verified, and a verified question lists at least one source page it was checked against. Explanations are limited to what the source states. The checks are logged. We still get things wrong sometimes: if you think a question or its answer is wrong, please tell us.

The questions and answers stay on our server and reach your browser one question at a time, so the page can’t be read to find the answers. See Privacy for what is kept if you create an account.

Pictures

The illustrations on this site were drawn for it in code. There are no stock photos, and none of the pictures are of real people.

Who is behind it

Daily Tech IQ is built and run by one person under the name Zaterra Labs, using AI tools to do repeatable work. It is free, shows no ads and loads no third-party analytics script. The only counting is anonymous daily totals, such as how many people played and which questions are hardest, kept in its own database with no names, addresses or cookies. If that changes, the Privacy page will say so first.