Technology | The Guardian

Menier Chocolate Factory, London

Ban on Chinese owned video-sharing app marks U-turn from previous relaxed positionBritain is expected to announce a ban on the Chinese owned video-sharing app TikTok on government mobile phones imminently, bringing the UK inline with the US and European Commission and reflecting deteriorating relations with Beijing.The decision marks a sharp reverse from the UK’s previously relaxed position, but some critics and experts said Britain should also extend the ban to cover personal phones used by ministers and officials – and even consider a complete ban. Continue reading...

The right is claiming that political correctness – not capitalism – caused this financial catastrophe. Really?You’d think that witnessing the second-biggest bank failure in US history would be a sobering moment. Since Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on Friday amid a bank run, however, Republicans have instead been twisting themselves into inelegant pretzels to blame “wokeness” for the financial disaster.For context, SVB – which before it collapsed was the 16th largest bank in the US and worth more than $200bn in assets – proudly reported that aside from 45% of its board being women, it also had “1 Black”, “1 LGBTQ+” and “2 Veterans”. According to Republicans, the bank’s focus on “woke” ideals is what led to its ultimate demise.Tayo Bero is a Guardian US contributing writer Continue reading...

Demise of Silicon Valley Bank has rattled not just businesses and investors but the ecosystem that grew up around itStartup founders, venture capitalists and aspirational entrepreneurs descended on Austin on Friday for the annual South by Southwest conference as they do every year. But as the day wore on, a sense of fear and confusion began to take hold amid the usual energy and buzz in the Texas capital.Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a financial institution that had become the go-to bank for nearly half of all venture-backed tech startups and many in the healthcare sector, was collapsing. Major venture capital firms and startup incubators including Y Combinator and Founders Fund had advised their founders to reduce exposure to SVB. The industry began to panic. Continue reading...

Two in five Venmo users reveal ‘sensitive information’ on the app – we hear from those who discovered something bigOfficially, Venmo is an app for transferring money from one person to another. In the US, where most banks do not offer instant free money transfers, it was revolutionary for simple things like splitting the bill on dinner, or sending their roommates half of the rent. But because the Venmo app has a “home feed”, an endless scroll that shows payments between users, it’s also a sneaky form of social media. You can see how your friends spend their money – and who they spend it with.After looking through my account, I now know that my high school soccer coach gave his wife money to spend at Petco last night. A friend of a friend went out for pizza. An old co-worker paid her dad for HBO Max. A man I met once exclusively sends people payments for the horse emoji – I assume this is code for ketamine, the horse tranquilizer/party drug, but maybe he has a secret gambling habit. Continue reading...

Boys in particular need to look at behaviour inspired by likes of Andrew Tate, says lead on violence against women and girlsA senior police officer has recommended teaching schoolchildren from primary level about the risks of online image-sharing and misogynistic social media figures such as Andrew Tate.Maggie Blyth, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for violence against women and girls, said pupils should also be taught how to deal with the likes of Tate, who has become an emblem of a culture of online misogyny. Continue reading...

From a ball point pen to a skyscraper, everything we make needs one or more of these design wondersWhen I was about five years old, I was living with my parents and sister in snowy upstate New York. It was the 1980s and one day I sat in front of my favourite large rectangular lunchbox, adorned with a picture of the Muppets on the front. This one held my huge collection of crayons – long, short, thick, thin, in every shade available. Like most children, I was continuously curious and I wanted to “discover” what was inside my crayons. So I peeled off the paper that enveloped them, then held them one at a time against the sharp edge of the open box and snapped them in two. My great anticipation was rather dampened to find, well, just more crayon inside. Nevertheless I persisted.When I was a little older and started writing words on paper with pencils, I would twist them inside a sharpener to see if the grey rod that marked my sheets went all the way through its body. It did. From there, I graduated to pens – far from the disappointing crayons of my early childhood, the insides of fountain pens and ballpoints contained slender cartridges and helical springs, held together with a top that threaded, screw-like, on to the rest of the pen. Continue reading...

End-to-end encryption does not prevent wall-to-wall media coverage, as many prominent users have discovered to their costIn modern communications, emails can be the digital equivalents of scribbled notes – all lower case and poor punctuation – or pedantic official documents, depending on context and recipients. But the key thing is that the prose is always deathless.That’s a rule that Tucker Carlson, a major Donald Trump supporter, is probably reckoning with at the moment. Disclosures of his emails in Dominion Voting Systems’s $1.6bn (£1.33bn) suit against Fox show the TV presenter admitting “I hate him [Trump] passionately”. Other emails show that Fox executives knew that Trump’s claims about a stolen election were false but still aired them as if they were legitimate. Awkward.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

Legislation puts duty of care on tech firms to protect under-18s but does not mandate use of specific age-checking technology

Intense shock, addiction and losing interest in other activities are some of readers’ experiences

A dizzying new game lets players live out their alt-rock dreams. Its creators explain how its pioneering design had to be note-perfectHas anyone ever told you that you lack rhythm? Have you ever belched out a flat note at karaoke and seen the room visibly deflate in front of you? Ever picked up a guitar to show off to your crush, only to fluff the fingering and mangle that lovely, romantic chord? Were you once at least somewhat musically accomplished, but now realising that you are not the young, cool alt-rocker you used to be, but a middle-aged 6 Music dad with lactose intolerance and a mortgage to worry about?Sometimes, you need to just pretend you’re a leather-jacketed rebel with a cocky smirk and knees that don’t pop every time you hunker down. And there’s no better place for that than a video game. Guitar Hero brought the rockstar fantasy to millions. The Artful Escape casts you as the son of a folk musician trying to make your own way playing operatic sci-fi prog rock. And then there’s this year’s Hi-Fi Rush, which puts all of its hyperactive-labrador energy into making sure you feel like a bona fide rockstar. Continue reading...

Drivers call for regulation of rideshare companies they say collect up to 50% of fares and arbitrarily close workers’ accountsFor more than five years James Jordan worked full time for Uber in Los Angeles, California, until early 2022, when he was permanently deactivated from the app – Uber’s equivalent of being fired.He said he later found out he was deactivated due to old customer complaints, but that Uber would not listen to his appeals or offer to provide dash-cam footage to disprove the allegations. Continue reading...

Wind-down and liquidation plan follows mass withdrawal of deposits after collapse of FTX exchangeThe cryptocurrency-focused US lender Silvergate is to wind down its operations after it was hit by customer withdrawals following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.The California-based bank had warned last week it was “less than well capitalised” after depositors demanding their money back, adding that it was evaluating its ability to operate as a going concern. Continue reading...

Move comes as White House backs bill that could give it power to ban Chinese-owned app nationwideTikTok has announced a data security regime for protecting user information across Europe, as political pressure increases in the US to ban the social video app.The plan, known as Project Clover, involves user data being stored on servers in Ireland and Norway at an annual cost of €1.2bn (£1.1bn), while any data transfers outside Europe will be vetted by a third-party IT company. Continue reading...

Dan Douglas started Duke Smoochem as a Twitter joke. Now the project has spiralled into an epic portrait of a declining nation – with everyone from Matt Hancock to GB News in its satirical crosshairsThe Daily Mail would be horrified if it knew what it had spawned. Back in 2021, when news broke of Matt Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair, the tabloid printed a floorplan of the health secretary’s office, complete with details such as “queen painting” and “kiss door”. For most people, it was unnecessary detail added to one of the most nauseating moments in modern politics. But for Dan Douglas, a 39-year-old from London, it served as artistic inspiration.“It reminded me of a map from a video game,” he says. As a 90s teenager, Douglas had adored the first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. “I was the perfect age for its relentless pixelated gore and crude humour. Playing it felt almost illicit,” he says. So wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to re-create the Hancock scandal using that game’s built-in level editor? That should get a few laughs on Twitter, he reasoned. And then things spiralled out of control. Continue reading...

US regulators receive two complaints about Model Y SUVs with missing bolt in latest string of safety problems for companyUS auto safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla’s Model Y SUV after getting two complaints that the steering wheels can come off while being driven.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says the investigation covers an estimated 120,000 vehicles from the 2023 model year. Continue reading...

Sixth failure this year comes against backdrop of financial and regulatory pressures on the companyOn Monday Twitter broke for the sixth time this year. Clicking any link on the social network resulted in an error message, while attempting to post a new image resulted in nothing but a big blank box where the picture should have been.Unlike the last four outages – three in February, and another already in March – the site wasn’t completely unavailable, giving Twitter users the opportunity to engage in their favourite activity: discussing the continued destruction of Twitter live on the site. (The sixth outage this year, in January, only affected Android users.) The trending topics on the site were promptly filled with various phrases relating to the outage, as users speculated that Elon Musk’s own demands had ultimately caused the failure. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC; Grasshopper Manufacture/Koei Tecmo

Cybersecurity firm notes emergence of sophisticated email scams featuring improved linguistic complexityThe cybersecurity firm Darktrace has warned that since the release of ChatGPT it has seen an increase in criminals using artificial intelligence to create more sophisticated scams to con employees and hack into businesses.The Cambridge-based company, which reported a 92% drop in operating profits in the half year to the end of December, said AI was further enabling “hacktivist” cyber-attacks using ransomware to extort money from businesses. Continue reading...

Haraldur Thorleifsson was locked out of his computer, but after nine days of no answer from the company, decided to tweet the CEOIf you’re not told you are fired, are you really fired? At Twitter, probably.Haraldur Thorleifsson, who until recently was employed at Twitter, logged in to his computer last Sunday to do some work – only to find himself locked out, along with 200 others. Continue reading...

Certain prompts make the chatbot take on an uncensored persona who is free of the usual content standardsPeople are figuring out ways to bypass ChatGPT’s content moderation guardrails, discovering a simple text exchange can open up the AI program to make statements not normally allowed.While ChatGPT can answer most questions put to it, there are content standards in place aimed at limiting the creation of text that promotes hate speech, violence, misinformation and instructions on how to do things that are against the law. Continue reading...

The bill would allow commerce department to impose restrictions on technologies that pose a risk to national securityThe White House said it backed legislation introduced on Tuesday by a dozen senators to give the administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.The endorsement boosts efforts by a number of lawmakers to ban the popular ByteDance-owned app, which is used by more than 100 million Americans. Continue reading...

4Chan users have posted the tech giant’s new ChatGPT-style language model online, putting the future of AI at a crossroads – and opening up a whole host of dangers

Thousands of Twitter accounts post stream of praise for former president and ridicule his critics, including Haley and DeSantisOver the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts – perhaps hundreds of thousands of them – to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump.Besides posting adoring words about the former president, the fake accounts ridiculed Trump’s critics from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador who is challenging her onetime boss for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Continue reading...

US legislation could block the social media app as fears of Chinese state surveillance increaseThe Chinese spy balloon that hovered over the US last month did not just damage relations between Beijing and Washington, it also cast a shadow over the future of TikTok.Last week, a US congressional committee backed legislation that would give the US president the power to ban the Chinese-owned social video app. The Republican chair of the committee, Michael McCaul, said the incident had reinforced fears of Chinese state surveillance, describing TikTok as a “spy balloon in your phone”. Continue reading...

Users asking questions to be given option of ‘creative’, ‘balanced’ or ‘precise’ responseMicrosoft’s Bing chatbot is offering replies in three different tones as it seeks to address some criticisms of the service.The search engine’s chatbot, powered by the same technology behind ChatGPT, will now give users options for three types of response: creative (“creating surprise and entertainment”), balanced (“reasonable and coherent”) or precise (“concise, prioritising accuracy”). Continue reading...

As Oscars night approaches, we pick out some of the rare movie tie-ins that don’t make you want to throw popcorn at your screenDesigned by ex-Atari luminary David Crane (Pitfall, Decathlon), Activision’s wonderful tie-in captured the humour and spirit of the classic comedy. Players set up their own ghostbusting franchises, buying equipment before setting out to capture spooks. With its use of digitised speech and a jaunty reproduction of the film’s soundtrack, it showed that games really could provide an authentic movie experience. Continue reading...

Alphabetti theatre, Newcastle

A cyberpunk cat, a murderous lamb and a lonesome fox battle Norse gods at this year’s Baftas for video games, with the winners to be announced on 30 MarchThe nominees for this year’s Bafta Games Awards have been announced, with God of War Ragnarök and Stray leading the field. This will be the 19th year that Bafta has honoured the work of the games industry with an awards ceremony, which will be held on 30 March.Sony’s PlayStation 5 big-hitters God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Forbidden West are prominent, nominated in 11 and 6 categories respectively. Stray, a French game about a cat stuck in an underground robot settlement, is up for nine awards, and FromSoftware’s 20m-selling open-world masterpiece Elden Ring is up for eight. Tunic, a homage to classic adventure games, is in with a chance at five awards. Continue reading...

A male voice offers ‘commentary’ as the service curates a stream of songs I’ve heard before. Do I really need this?I’m listening to Radiohead’s Creep on the radio. “You may not know this,” the DJ coos patronizingly, “but this song turns 30 this year.” So far, so titbit of trivia on FM drivetime. The only difference is this DJ is not a real person.AI DJ is the next move in Spotify’s never-ending goal to “personalize” our listening experiences. Like its Discover Weekly new music playlist, or its end-of-year Wrapped recap, the AI DJ curates a stream of songs it thinks I’ll like based on my listening history. Along with the tunes, I get segues of “commentary” from a male AI voice, which bursts with the forced friendliness of an over-invested high school guidance counselor. Continue reading...

Tesla chief executive was expected to lay out plan for a smaller, more affordable electric vehicle, but it did not materializeTesla will cut assembly costs by half in future generations of cars, engineers told investors on Wednesday, but Elon Musk did not unveil a much-awaited small, affordable electric vehicle.Shares fell more than 5% in after hours trade following presentations at the company’s investor day from its Texas headquarters. Continue reading...

Shareholders sue the Twitter CEO again, alleging they were defrauded with false claims of the vehicles’ capabilitiesElon Musk is facing yet another lawsuit as shareholders of Tesla accuse the chief executive and his company of overstating the effectiveness and safety of their electric vehicles’ autopilot and full self-driving technologies.Shareholders have alleged in the proposed class-action lawsuit that Tesla defrauded them over four years with false and misleading statements that concealed how its technologies – suspected as a possible cause of multiple fatal crashes – “created a serious risk of accident and injury”. The case was filed on Monday in a San Francisco federal court. Continue reading...

Ellie tended to Joel in a dilapidated basement, then flashed back to bliss, booze and photo booths with her best friend – just before disaster struckThis article contains spoilers for The Last of Us TV series. Do not read unless you have seen episodes one to seven …I can’t help but feel torn after this seventh episode. It has nothing to do with my enjoyment of it or the quality, but what it means for the rest of the series. Continue reading...

Using the platform to book an Evri delivery signs sellers up to PacklinkBefore Christmas my husband used eBay to sell two toys, and went on the site to book the parcels firm Evri to deliver them. The problem is that they didn’t arrive. In the past we have been able to claim whenever a parcel got lost but not this time.We have tried logging on via the website, chat, or the customer service phone line but to no avail. Whenever we give Evri the tracking number of our parcels, the company says they cannot be found and to follow “our protocols” for lost parcels. Continue reading...

Nancy Faeser says Ukraine war has exacerbated German cybersecurity concernsGermany’s interior minister has warned of a “massive danger” facing Germany from Russian sabotage, disinformation and spying attacks.Nancy Faeser said Vladimir Putin was putting huge resources into cyber-attacks as a key part of his war of aggression. “The cybersecurity concerns have been exacerbated by the war. The attacks of pro-Russia hackers have increased,” she said in an interview with the news network Funke Mediengruppe published on Sunday. Continue reading...

The widely popular chatbot is churning out uncanny animal designs and we tried one for a ‘hilarious’ outcomeThe meteoric rise of ChatGPT has sparked an artificial intelligence frenzy, stoking fears that the technology could upend jobs, search engines and schools. But online creators have identified one realm yet safe from the computer takeover: fiber arts.A number of TikTok users have deployed ChatGPT to write patterns for crochet creations, yielding “cursed” results that are testing the boundaries of nascent artificial intelligence capabilities. Continue reading...

PM under pressure to follow EU and US in taking step over fears Chinese-owned app poses cybersecurity riskRishi Sunak has been urged to ban government officials from using TikTok in line with moves by the EU and US, amid growing cybersecurity fears over China.Officials in Europe and the US have been told to limit the use of the Chinese-owned social video app over concerns that data can be accessed by Beijing. Continue reading...

I love games but they’ve never affected me like music or books … then I found one about parental regret and bad life decisionsI have always thought there is a contradiction at the heart of video games: by virtue of their interactivity, I find them much more engaging than TV, music, movies – but I’ve never related to them emotionally and psychologically to the same degree as I have with other entertainment forms. The Jam sang all the thoughts I had as a working-class teenager. Watching Friends, I aspired to be popping in and out of my pals’ apartments in our 20s, dropping quips. Bruce Willis movies always made me feel that I, too, could wisecrack my way out of any situation. And latterly, the books of Matt Haig have helped me analyse depression, anxiety, loneliness and what, if anything, I’ve done with my life.Video games never did that for me. Until I played Old Man’s Journey. Continue reading...

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers helps public defenders navigate new technologies used against their clientsThe first time Caleb Kenyon, a defense attorney in Florida, saw a geofence warrant was when a new client received an alarming email from Google in January 2020. Local police were requesting personal data from the client, Zachary McCoy, and Kenyon had just seven days to stop Google from turning it over, the email said.When Kenyon asked Google for more information, he received a copy of the warrant’s cover letter. It was unlike anything he or other lawyers in his network had ever seen. Continue reading...

The platform banned the Russia-controlled publication last year for its Ukraine falsehoods, but its content is still posted on various channelsHundreds of videos produced by the Russia-controlled publication RT have found their way on to YouTube in the past year, despite the platform’s ban of such media last year.YouTube, which is owned by Google, banned all Russian state-funded media from its platform globally in March 2022, citing a policy barring content that “denies, minimizes or trivializes well-documented violent events” as Russia sought to guide the narrative on its war in Ukraine. Continue reading...

Clamshell phone with longer battery life aims squarely at challenging Samsung’s Z Flip 4Oppo’s first folding flip phone to be sold outside its Chinese home market is the Find N2 Flip, an Android clamshell aimed squarely at challenging Samsung’s popular Z Flip 4.The next-gen flipper costs £849, undercutting Samsung by £50, and uses a different type of hinge that aims to help solve one of the most obvious flaws with folding phones: the crease in the middle of the screen. Continue reading...

Founding editor says 500 pitches rejected this month and their ‘authors’ banned, as influencers promote ‘get rich quick’ schemesOne of the most prestigious publishers of science fiction short stories has closed itself to submissions after a deluge of AI-generated pitches overwhelmed its editorial team.Clarkesworld, which has published writers including Jeff VanderMeer, Yoon Ha Lee and Catherynne Valente, is one of the few paying publishers to accept open submissions for short stories from new writers. Continue reading...

The game series formerly known as Yakuza has been an inroad to modern Japan for its legions of overseas fans. Now, it hopes to do the same for Japanese historyLike a Dragon – the game series formerly known as Yakuza – has been going for almost 20 years. These are melodramatic games about the feuds and inner humanity of Japanese gangsters, one part soap-opera, one part kerb-stomping, chair-throwing over-the-top brawler and one part surprisingly true-to-life recreation of Japanese city nightlife. In their cities, from Osaka to Yokohama, in between knocking thugs’ heads together and navigating Yakuza clan drama, you can eat and drink at real-world bars and restaurants, duck into an arcade and play the games there, visit hostess clubs and sing karaoke. For a lot of its overseas players, its vibrant, sleazy recreations of Tokyo’s nightlife have been their first introduction to modern Japan.But that was never the intention. “When we made this game, we never planned on releasing it overseas. We didn’t think people would like it,” says Hiroyuki Sakamoto, now series director, who’s been working on the series since its first planning meetings in 2003. “So we were able to focus on our Japanese audience, on making a game for and of Japan … we thought we were making a game that was probably only ever gonna be enjoyed by older guys with an interest in [Tokyo nightlife district] Kabukicho and its criminal underworld.” Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The two tech behemoths are betting big that their ‘Bard’ and ‘Bing’ services will revolutionise the way we navigate the net

Could artificial intelligence offer a fairer and more efficient way of policing?San Francisco’s board of supervisors recently voted to let their police deploy robots equipped with lethal explosives – before backtracking several weeks later. In America, the vote sparked a fierce debate on the militarisation of the police, but it raises fundamental questions for us all about the role of robots and AI in fighting crime, how policing decisions are made and, indeed, the very purpose of our criminal justice systems. In the UK, officers operate under the principle of “policing by consent” rather than by force. But according to the 2020 Crime Survey for England and Wales, public confidence in the police has fallen from 62% in 2017 to 55%. One recent poll asked Londoners if the Met was institutionally sexist and racist. Nearly two thirds answered either “probably” or “definitely”.This is perhaps unsurprising, given the high-profile cases of crimes by police officers such as Wayne Couzens, who murdered Sarah Everard, and David Carrick, who recently pleaded guilty to 49 offences including rape and sexual assault. Continue reading...

With 15bn views to #MorningRoutine TikTok videos, Rachel Signer decided to wake up to the social media trend – and was served some societal critique with her cereal

The American writer on her film of the moment, a fantastic young novelist and an animated series that’s wonderfully humanThe novelist Gabrielle Zevin, whose Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow appeared on many of 2022’s books of the year lists, was born in New York in 1977. She studied English at Harvard, where she met her partner, the film director Hans Canosa. Zevin wrote the screenplay for Canosa’s 2005 film, Conversations With Other Women, and the pair adapted two of Zevin’s novels for the screen, most recently The Storied Life of AJ Fikry. She is working on a film version of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which follows two childhood friends as they reunite in adulthood to create video games. She lives in Los Angeles. Continue reading...

Sam Patten, an American consultant later mired in controversy, exploited emails obtained by Tal Hanan’s teamIn late December 2014, a team from Cambridge Analytica flew to Madrid for meetings with a handful of old and new contacts. A member of the former Libyan royal family referred to as “His Royal Highness” was there. So, too, was the son of a US billionaire, a Nigerian businessman and a private Israeli intelligence operative.For Alexander Nix, the Etonian chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and his new employee Brittany Kaiser, who networked like most other people breathed, there may have been nothing unusual about such a gathering. Continue reading...

Artificial intelligence has implication across the board, solving problems and raising others

In the past, leaps in technology replaced low-paid jobs with a greater number of higher-paid jobs. This time, it may be different