Mark Zuckerberg says in earnings call Meta is still devoted to virtual reality even as it bolsters its AI developmentMeta is not pivoting away from its signature product, the metaverse. Or at least that’s what the Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, is arguing.Despite reports that sales teams at Meta have spent less time pitching the metaverse to advertisers, Zuckerberg claimed on the tech firm’s latest quarterly earnings call that it’s business as usual over at the company formerly known as Facebook. “A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision, so I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate,” the CEO said. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6BMX0)
Firm’s first folding phone announced with cheaper smartphone and tablet smart display hybridGoogle has announced a range of new Pixel mobile gadgets, including its first folding phone and an Android tablet that doubles as a smart display when docked and charging at home.Unveiled as part of the company’s annual I/O developer conference, the Android devices are designed to compete with rivals from Apple and Samsung as Google continues its own-brand hardware push. Continue reading...
Annie McAdams represents clients who claim Meta’s products connect vulnerable people with sex buyersOn 14 March 2022, Annie McAdams, a personal injury lawyer running a small firm in Houston, Texas, filed a civil action suit on behalf of one of her clients. The plaintiff was a 23-year-old woman, who had endured years of sexual exploitation at the hands of a convicted trafficker. The defendant was one of the most powerful technology companies in the world.Contained within McAdams’s federal suit was a series of allegations that Meta – the owner of Facebook and Instagram, which are used by more than 3 billion people every day – had knowingly created a breeding ground for human trafficking and was actively facilitating the buying and selling of people for sex online. Continue reading...
A tour of the sites, featuring fake facts and odd wording, left me wondering what was realBreaking news from celebritiesdeaths.com: the president is dead.At least that’s what the highly reliable website informed its readers last month, under the no-nonsense headline “Biden dead. Harris acting president, address 9am ET”. The site explained that Joe Biden had “passed away peacefully in his sleep” and Kamala Harris was taking over, above a bizarre disclaimer: “I’m sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy on generating misleading content.” Continue reading...
The pandemic ushered in an era of ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘bare minimum Mondays’ but workers have since lost leverageIt seems that it was only yesterday that the media was filled with stories about workers calling the shots. There were the work-from-homers who refused to come back to the office after the pandemic was long over. There were the “quiet quitters” who proudly – and publicly – admitted that, even though they were collecting a paycheck from their employer they weren’t doing much at all during the day except looking for another job. And then there’s the group of workers who were advocating for “bare minimum Mondays” because apparently, a five-day workweek was just too much to bear.During the past few years, we’ve heard employees publicly demand unlimited paid time off, four-day workweeks, wellness sabbaticals, gigantic bonuses to switch jobs and even “pawternity leave” – getting time off when you adopt a puppy. Facing labor shortages, customer demands and supply chain headaches, most employers caved. The Age of the Worker blossomed. Continue reading...
Buzzfeed, Vice, Gawker and Drudge Report are all traffic-war casualties, but they succeeded in shaking up the media landscapeToward the end of Traffic, a new account of the early rock n roll years of internet publishing, Ben Smith writes that the failings of Buzzfeed News had come about as a result of a “utopian ideology, from a kind of magical thinking”.No truer words, perhaps, for a digital-based business that for a decade paddled in a warm bath of venture capital funding but never fully controlled its pricing and distribution, a basic business requirement that applies to information as much as it does to selling lemonade in the school yard or fossil fuels. Continue reading...
White House says it will invest $140m in AI advances that are ‘ethical, trustworthy, responsible and serve the public good’The White House has announced measures to address the risks of an unchecked race to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence, as the US president and vice-president, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, met chief executives at the forefront of the industry’s rapid advances.In a statement released before the meeting with the leaders of Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, the US government said firms developing the technology had a “fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public”. Continue reading...
Apple and Microsoft also collaborated on the technology which allows authentication with fingerprint ID, facial ID or a pinGoogle is moving one step closer to ditching passwords, rolling out its passkey technology to Google accounts from Thursday.The passkey is designed to replace passwords entirely by allowing authentication with fingerprint ID, facial ID or pin on the phone or device you use for authentication. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6BE65)
New tablet offers high-end screen and specs for a mid-range price but is held back by softwareThe first Android tablet from OnePlus sticks to the firm’s tradition of offering high-end technology at slightly cheaper prices – but will that be enough to beat the market-leading iPad?The OnePlus Pad costs £449 and hopes to undercut rivals such as Samsung’s £749 Galaxy Tab S8 and Apple’s £499 iPad.Screen: 11.6in 2800x2000 144Hz LCD (296 pixels an inch)Processor: MediaTek Dimensity 9000RAM: 8GBStorage: 128GBOperating system: Oxygen OS 13.1 (Android 13)Camera: 13MP rear; 8MP front facingConnectivity: wifi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, USB-CDimensions: 258 x 189.4 x 6.5mmWeight: 552g Continue reading...
Dr Geoffrey Hinton has been inundated with requests to talk after quitting Google to warn about risk of digital intelligenceThe man often touted as the godfather of artificial intelligence will be responding to requests for help from Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk and the White House, he says, just days after quitting Google to warn the world about the risk of digital intelligence.Dr Geoffrey Hinton, 75, won computer science’s highest honour, the Turing award, in 2018 for his work on “deep learning”, along with Meta’s Yann Lecun and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio. Continue reading...
SoundThinking, a gunshot detection company, worked with top police officials to secure a city contract, according to emails obtained by the GuardianOn 5 February 2022, police in Portland, Oregon, sent out a bulletin pleading with the public for information about a recent homicide case. Police had found Corey M Eady injured with several gunshot wounds, and the 44-year-old had died shortly after being taken to a hospital. “This is the 11th homicide in Portland this year,” the bulletin read. “All 11 have been by gunfire.”The next day, Portland police captain James Crooker got a text. “Ready for some help?”Shotspotter marketed itself aggressively to Portland police by tapping its vast network of law enforcement partners and supporters – some of whom now work at the company – to vouch for or advocate for the service.The company backed up claims it is a non-instrusive and effective public safety tool with academic studies, some of which it funded or helped set up.Once Portland police was on board, the company worked closely with Crooker, the Portland police captain, to win over a volunteer-led police oversight group, Fitcog, which recommended the use of Shotspotter devices to the mayor, Ted Wheeler.Greene, the representative, also helped Crooker prepare for media interviews and even offered the company’s services to help the city apply for federal grants to fund a contract. Continue reading...
by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent on (#6BB3W)
Advance raises prospect of new ways to restore speech in those struggling to communicate due to stroke or motor neurone diseaseAn AI-based decoder that can translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text has been developed, in a breakthrough that allows a person’s thoughts to be read non-invasively for the first time.The decoder could reconstruct speech with uncanny accuracy while people listened to a story – or even silently imagined one – using only fMRI scan data. Previous language decoding systems have required surgical implants, and the latest advance raises the prospect of new ways to restore speech in patients struggling to communicate due to a stroke or motor neurone disease. Continue reading...
Robots praised by New York mayor for searching ruins of a parking garage collapse, but critics fear robots will collect private data“Digidog is out of the pound,” Eric Adams declared in April. The New York City mayor also insisted the successful use of the controversial robot in response to a recent building collapse should convince critics such devices can improve safety in the city.Adams commended first responders’ use of the four-legged robot in the ruins of a parking garage collapse last week in Manhattan, in which one person was killed and five injured. Continue reading...
With more than half of people now gamers, film and TV versions of their favourites can get the kind of high scores others can only dream ofFor fans of Mario and Luigi, the moustachioed plumbers who began life as blocky 2D pixels in the early 1980s, the prospect of a $100m feature film stuffed with special effects and Hollywood stars including Chris Pratt, Jack Black and Seth Rogen could feel like defeating the boss in the final level of a platform game.Now the box-office-busting Super Mario Bros movie, alongside the critically acclaimed success of TV phenomenon The Last of Us, are set to fuel a record decade for gaming adaptations, as film and TV companies turn their sights elsewhere after years of mining comic books for superheroes. Continue reading...
by Joe Stone, Alfie Packham, Olivia Petter, Chloe Dav on (#6B20N)
For many, sexting is the new normal – but how do you know if you’re any good at it? And what happens when it goes wrong? Six writers on the most memorable sexts they’ve sent or receivedFor good or bad, given how intertwined we are with our digital devices, sexting has become relatively common especially among the more digitally inclined natives. For some it’s merely flirting; for others, it can be a form of harassment. People who sext probably view it as harmless, fun, even akin to foreplay. Non-sexters will probably think the opposite. One thing is certain: like sex, sexting is here to stay. Continue reading...
People are waking up to the benefits of using salary sacrifice schemes to buy greener vehiclesIf you have been thinking about switching to an electric car but are worried about the cost, talk to Bill Hopkinson. Until four months ago, the sales and marketing director was driving more than 30,000 miles a year in a diesel BMW and spending about £800 a month on lease payments, fuel, insurance and maintenance.Fast-forward to today, and he is now behind the wheel of a new, fully electric Audi Q4 e-tron. His total monthly expenditure on the car, including the use of public charging points, has fallen to £611 – meaning he is on course to save more than £2,200 a year, while, at the same time, slashing his carbon footprint. Continue reading...
Elon Musk’s attempt to make the social media site profitable seemed to flop as the verification check lost all meaningFriday marked the first full day Twitter’s new policies for verified accounts were applied – and the results were not pretty.Twenty-four hours after blue checkmarks began to disappear from formerly verified Twitter accounts, chaos reigned on the website, with impersonation and false information running rampant and few people signing up for the service the changes were meant to promote. Continue reading...
Employees were informed via email that a ‘significant’ number would lose their jobs to cut costs and bring fares in line with UberThe ride-hailing service Lyft is preparing to lay off hundreds of employees just days after its new CEO, David Risher, began steering the company with an eye toward driving down costs to help bring its fares more in line with its biggest rival, Uber.Risher, a former Amazon executive, informed Lyft’s workforce of more than 4,000 employees in an email posted online on Friday that a “significant” number of them will lose their jobs. The message came at the end of his first week as Lyft’s CEO. Continue reading...
The test of the new phone alert system this weekend comes after learning from earlier experiences – and the warning strategies of other nationsThere have been accusations of nanny statism, warnings from domestic abuse charities over inadvertently alerting abusers to hidden phones, and even pet shops cordoning off smaller animals so they don’t get frightened when the government’s emergency alert system is tested on Sunday at 3pm.One thing is certain though: the UK government has taken its time in getting the system up and running, taking more than a decade to get to this first nationwide test. Continue reading...
End of ‘lords & peasants system’ may help business in short term but risks sustainability if it leads to loss of trustTwitter’s aristocracy is no more. Last year, Elon Musk described the verification process as a “lords & peasants system” and on Thursday he deployed the guillotine. Feudalism has now given way to capitalism: money gets you status.In a long-threatened cull, famous names including Cristiano Ronaldo, Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, JK Rowling and Sir Paul McCartney lost the blue ticks that confer verified status on accounts. Continue reading...
Composer Takeshi Furukawa talks about creating the soundtrack for Fumito Ueda’s touching tale about the relationship between human and beastFrom the opening moments of The Last Guardian, developer Japan Studio and legendary game director Fumito Ueda need you to understand one simple thing: this game is about empathy. Before you are given the opportunity to learn anything about its gorgeous, ruined world, you must heal the broken creature you find in your cell. Taking in its cropped horns and the spears jammed into its back, you know something is wrong. This creature, Trico … it is feral, it is feared. And yet, you must care for it. You know that, immediately. Anyone who has ever had a troubled pet will know how it feels to pursue compassion through fear, demonstrate love despite frustration.“I believe the reason Ueda-san’s games are so successful in establishing a bond, whether it be with a girl in Ico, or a horse in Shadow of the Colossus, is because he lets those moments play out without music,” says composer Takeshi Furukawa, who penned the score for The Last Guardian. It’s odd to hear a composer praise the space in between the notes, but it makes sense when you listen to the game, because for the most part, the score is notably absent. It says more with silence than it does with anything else. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6B0X3)
Adjust these settings to stop your 4G or 5G phone making a noise during test at 3pm on 23 AprilThe the UK’s emergency alert system is due to be tested at 3pm on Sunday 23 April, causing all 4G and 5G-capable mobile phones in the country to make a loud siren-like sound even if they are placed on silent.The alerts are designed to notify the public of life-threatening emergencies, but there are cases where the test could expose hidden mobile phones and put people at risk of domestic abuse or put others in danger.Settings > Notifications > Emergency AlertsSettings > Safety and emergency > Wireless emergency alerts Continue reading...
From post-Brexit satire to harrowing journeys based on research and true stories, these are our top picksPapers, PleaseThis year is the 10th anniversary of Lucas Pope’s wrenching game about being a border officer in the functional communist country of Arstotzka, deciding when to turn desperate people away and when to risk your job but save your conscience by letting them slip by. It remains an impactful and illuminating exploration of how documentation can save or cost lives, and the moral and human cost of border enforcement. Continue reading...
Investigations reveal limited efforts to ‘clean’ datasets of fascist, pirated and malicious materialFresh fears have been raised about the training material used for some of the largest and most powerful artificial intelligence models, after several investigations exposed the fascist, pirated and malicious sources from which the data is harvested.One such dataset is the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, or C4, assembled by Google from more than 15m websites and used to train both the search engine’s LaMDA AI as well as Meta’s GPT competitor, LLaMA. Continue reading...
Chief executive Jonah Peretti says in company-wide email BuzzFeed ‘can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News’BuzzFeed is shutting down what remains of its award-winning news department, signalling the end of an era for a website that once promised to upend the industry.Founder Jonah Peretti told staff on Thursday that “the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News” and would be looking to make substantial redundancies across the company. Continue reading...
Global alliance including NCA and FBI says Meta’s decision to encrypt direct messages could harm childrenAn alliance of the world’s most powerful law enforcement agencies including the FBI, Interpol and Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) have condemned Meta’s plans to encrypt direct messages on Facebook Messenger and Instagram, saying that doing so will weaken the ability to keep child users safe.The Virtual Global Taskforce, made up of 15 agencies, is chaired by the NCA and also includes Europol and the Australian federal police among its membership. The VGT has spoken out, it says, owing to the “impending design choices” by Meta, which it says could cause serious harm. Continue reading...
Drop in company’s gross margins in first-quarter earnings signal price cuts could hurt financials with share prices taking a tumbleTesla narrowly missed Wall Street expectations in the first quarter of 2023 and gross margins dropped significantly in a signal that a series of price cuts could hurt the company’s financials. The company posted a revenue of 85 cents a share on $23.33bn total revenue, just below analysts’ prediction of 86 cents a share on $23.34bn.Gross margins, a figure that investors are paying close attention to this quarter, dropped from 29.1% to 19.3% year-over-year after the company rolled out a series of recent price cuts. Continue reading...
Social media firm will cull 4,000 jobs immediately as part of larger plan to cut 10,000 jobs amid tech industry slumpMeta workers are bracing for thousands of additional layoffs as the embattled social media firm continues to cut costs.A new round of layoffs began on Wednesday, according to a report from CNBC that was confirmed by Meta. The company will cull 4,000 jobs immediately as part of a larger plan to cut 10,000 jobs announced earlier this year, focusing largely on technical roles. Continue reading...
Lindy Cameron speech expected to present the security threat posed by Beijing as an epoch-defining challenge to the westChina poses an “epoch-defining” challenge to the west, the head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is reportedlyto warn.Lindy Cameron, who is the director of the GCHQ arm, will use a speech in Belfast this week to warn the UK and allies of the “dramatic rise of China as a technology superpower”. Continue reading...
Sundar Pichai calls for global regulatory framework similar to nuclear treaty amid safety concernsGoogle’s chief executive has said concerns about artificial intelligence keep him awake at night and that the technology can be “very harmful” if deployed wrongly.Sundar Pichai also called for a global regulatory framework for AI similar to the treaties used to regulate nuclear arms use, as he warned that the competition to produce advances in the technology could lead to concerns about safety being pushed aside. Continue reading...
Tech experts on how to work out want you need, set a budget and find the perfect device – or upgrade an existing one“The first question we’d ask is: ‘What are you going to be using it for?’” John Webster, the managing director of Digital Doctors in Brighton, says. “That is ultimately what guides us in terms of recommending what a person wants to buy.” Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6AVYN)
Rechargeable, water-resistant lamp you can pick up and take into the gardenThe latest Philips Hue Go smart light aims to be a great indoor table lamp that you can just pick up and head out into the garden with for impromptu illumination wherever you need it.It costs £140 ($160), which makes it fairly expensive for a rechargeable lamp, although in line with fancier designs. It joins the smaller, dish-shaped £80 Hue Go in the company’s portable lineup. Continue reading...
Franck Bohbot’s photographs of the city’s gaming spots depict a world of escapism familiar from American movies and artFranck Bohbot grew up in France, and when he arrived in Los Angeles in 2018 he found the sprawl hard to navigate. One reference point for him was the city’s video game bars, whose atmosphere he recognised from favourite adolescent films, including Terminator 2 and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Having wandered into his first one, Blipsy’s in Koreatown, he started chasing their escapist gloom. Several of the bars were bathed in light reminiscent of painter Edward Hopper’s lonely Nighthawks. In nearly all cases his camera found images whose timeframe was hard to locate: the arcade bars were rooted in 1980s gaming culture – Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Track & Field were staple machines – but their regulars, as here in Barcade in the northeast suburb of Highland Park, often referenced styles from the 1950s onwards.The project became a kind of quest: Bohbot went from borough to borough in the city and along the coast, searching out its joystick bars, acting on tipoffs and making lists of leads. It allowed him to draw an alternative map of the city, each location offering a new challenge, like levels of a video game. “Every arcade draws a slightly different crowd,” he noted, “from beachgoers and bar-hoppers to seriously committed gamers. The atmospheres vary, too – some bright, pristine, ordered; some dark, moody, covert.” Several bar owners, passionate about their creations, welcomed him and his camera; other times he had to be more discreet.Back to the Arcade by Franck Bohbot is published by Setanta Books (£55) Continue reading...
As we approach half a year of Musk’s acquisition of the social media firm, this is how key areas of the site’s business have performedOn 28 October 2022 Elon Musk tweeted “the bird is freed” as he marked his $44bn acquisition of Twitter.Nearly six months later, it became a dog. The distinctive avian logo the Tesla CEO had referenced in October had been replaced by a picture of a Shiba Inu canine – the face of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Continue reading...
The billionaire’s hamfisted handling of his new toy won’t much matter as long as politicians and media types remain bewitchedLast October, the richest manchild in human history fell into the trap he had dug for himself. Elon Musk was forced to purchase Twitter at an absurd price. He had no clear idea of what to do with his new acquisition, other than realising a fatuous idea about “free speech”. It was like watching a monkey acquire a delicate clock: the new owner started thrashing wildly about, slashing the headcount (from 8,000 to about 1,500) – in the process losing many of the people who knew how the machine worked – and generally having tantrums while tweeting incontinently from the smallest room in the company’s San Francisco headquarters.All of this frenetic activity was watched – and avidly reported for weeks – by the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that would have puzzled a visiting Martian anthropologist. After all, in relation to the other social-media companies, Twitter looked like a minnow. Most people have never used it. So why all the fuss about its acquisition by a flake of Cadbury proportions? Continue reading...
Tesla and Twitter boss said to be bringing together team, weeks after co-signing letter demanding pause in AI researchElon Musk is reportedly planning to launch an artificial intelligence company to compete with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, as Silicon Valley battles for dominance in the rapidly developing technology.The billionaire boss of Tesla and Twitter is in the process of bringing together a team of AI researchers and engineers and is in talks with several investors about the project, according to the Financial Times. Continue reading...
Tables may have freed up at Silicon Valley’s Coupa Cafe, but ‘scalability’ is still on the menu as tech workers look forwardIf you read the news, you’d think that San Francisco is dead. If you try to drive there during rush hour, you’d find that hard to believe.On a sunny Wednesday morning this month, I found myself on the Bay Bridge, en route to inspect the alleged demise of San Francisco and the reports that Silicon Valley’s golden age is coming to a halt. Continue reading...
Nima Momeni, who appeared in court, is suspected of stabbing the Cash App founder with a kitchen knife and leaving him to dieThe killing of the Cash App founder Bob Lee in San Francisco last week was a “planned and deliberate attack”, prosecutors in the case said in a court document on Friday.Officials allege Nima Momeni, a 38-year-old tech consultant, brought Lee to a secluded spot and stabbed him three times with a kitchen knife over an argument related to Momeni’s sister. Continue reading...
What better final bonding experience than a video game about a prison break before heading off to uni?My son Charlie leaves home in a few weeks. He will be 3,000 miles away. My heart is breaking. I decide we need one more formative games playing experience. Something we can bond over, that will maybe teach him a few life lessons along the way.A Way Out (PS4, Windows, Xbox One) is a two-player co-op game that has you trying to escape from a prison. It sounds like a perfect father-son activity. Five minutes in, my son’s character is naked, being most aggressively hosed down after an inmate tells him: “You think I’m a pussy? I fuck people up.” Understandably, I’m wondering whether this will be the light, fun bonding experience I’d hoped for. Continue reading...
Recording archive to include 25 more items among ‘defining sounds of nation’s history’, including Madonna’s Like a VirginThe original 1985 theme from Super Mario Bros, Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You and Madonna’s 1984 album Like a Virgin are among “the defining sounds of the nation’s history and culture” to be given places in the US national recording registry, the Library of Congress has announced.The Super Mario Bros music, officially known as the Ground Theme, written by the young Nintendo composer Koji Kondo, becomes the first music from a video game to enter the registry, which the library called “the most recognisable video game theme in history”. The tune has appeared in countless Mario-related incarnations. Continue reading...
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington on (#6APC6)
Citizen Lab says victims’ phones infected after being sent an iCloud calendar invitation in a ‘zero-click’ attackSecurity experts have warned about the emergence of previously unknown spyware with hacking capabilities comparable to NSO Group’s Pegasus that has already been used by clients to target journalists, political opposition figures and an employee of an NGO.Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School said the spyware, which is made by an Israeli company called QuaDream, infected some victims’ phones by sending an iCloud calendar invitation to mobile users from operators of the spyware, who are likely to be government clients. Victims were not notified of the calendar invitations because they were sent for events logged in the past, making them invisible to the targets of the hacking. Such attacks are known as “zero-click” because users of the mobile phone do not have to click on any malicious link or take any action in order to be infected. Continue reading...
Cyptocurrency’s steady increase in value reignites fears of widespread market manipulationA sharp rise in bitcoin prices has pushed the cryptocurrency above $30,000 (£24,118) for the first time since 10 June last year, just before the Celsius crypto lending company froze withdrawals in the run-up to its collapse.Even given that recovery, the token is still well below its all-time high of $68,000 in November 2021, and far below where it was before the failure of the Terra stablecoin caused the “crypto winter”. Continue reading...
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