Billionaire CEO claims bot is maximally truth-seeking' as he looks to rival DeepSeek, OpenAI and Google GeminiElon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot that integrates with X, formerly Twitter.Grok-3 debut comes at a critical moment in the AI arms race as Musk looks to compete with the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google. Musk's bot has seen less widespread adoption than DeepSeek's namesake chatbot, which wowed the world weeks ago and caused panic in stock markets, as well as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Continue reading...

As an early years specialist, I've seen the drastic impact of screens replacing physical activity and face-to-face interactionAs an early years education specialist, over the past decade I have seen children enter classrooms with fewer and fewer of the skills needed to begin their formal education. The key culprit, in my opinion? Screen time.On a child's first day at school, it's normal to expect a few nerves. But they should be able to move around confidently, pick up stationery, make new friends, build a relationship with their teacher and start to feel part of a wider community. Instead, a recent survey reported that some children in England and Wales are unable to sit up or hold a pencil. I have seen kids racked with separation anxiety and unable to form bonds. Upset and confused, they miss instructions and hold back or lash out. To a busy teacher this looks like a lack of ability, or a disruptive child to be managed. Children are simply being set up to fail.Kathryn Peckham is an early childhood consultant, researcher, author and founder of Nurturing Childhoods Continue reading...

Hampstead theatre, London

Fares is a refreshingly unpredictable voice, starting as a film director before moving into games; now, he says, working on a movie would be a vacation'There aren't many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelight's Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly firy and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, It doesn't matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that's refreshing - but isn't it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!"Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares' adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war. Continue reading...

Thanks to Donald Trump's sweeping executive orders attacking a number of terms, women' is literally being erasedThanks to the intolerant left, nobody can say the word women" any more! Do you remember when that was a major talking point in certain quarters? Prominent columnists wrote endless pieces declaring that the word women" had become verboten". The thought police, these people claimed, were forcing everyone to say bodies with vaginas" and menstruators" instead. Even the likes of Margaret Atwood tweeted articles with headlines like: Why can't we say woman' anymore?" Continue reading...

Army of digital imposters uses names associated with president's family in apparent bid to deceive investorsDespite once calling cryptocurrency a scam", Donald Trump made a theoretical fortune of billions after launching a self-named and highly controversial meme coin immediately before his second inauguration in January.Now an army of digital imposters is trying to cash in on the president's name and online presence to make their own crypto killing, according to a report in the Financial Times that details hundreds of copycat and spam coins" uploaded to Trump's official wallet in cyberspace. Continue reading...

DeepSeek's home | Bare bones | Liquid lift-off | Labour faithfuls? | School sports | Questionable teachingRachel Reeves is behind the tech curve in proposing to create Europe's Silicon Valley" (Report, 28 January). She should surely be considering an equivalent of Hangzhou, home of DeepSeek, the company that knocked $1tn off the value of US tech stocks in a day.

Yoshua Bengio says competition in field could mean danger, as international panel points to AI's malicious potential

Much of the power of work like counselling lies in a relationship where we really see each other. And tech just can't do that

From pay shortfalls to being dropped by apps, drivers face a range of issues - often with no way to fix themMost days a thicket of couriers can be seen around the McDonald's in Northern Ireland's Ballymena, waiting for orders and discussing the mysteries of the systems that rule their working lives.This week gig workers, trade unions and human rights groups launched a campaign for greater openness from Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo about the logic underpinning opaque algorithms that determine what work they do and what they are paid. Continue reading...

We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe than pick up a pen. But in the process we are in danger of losing cognitive skills, sensory experience - and a connection to historyHumming away in offices on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon and in the White House is a technology that represents the pragmatism, efficiency and unsentimental nature of American bureaucracy: the autopen. It is a device that stores a person's signature, replicating it as needed using a mechanical arm that holds a real pen.Like many technologies, this rudimentary robotic signature-maker has always provoked ambivalence. We invest signatures with meaning, particularly when the signer is well known. During the George W Bush administration, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, generated a small wave of outrage when reporters revealed that he had been using an autopen for his signature on the condolence letters that he sent to the families of fallen soldiers. Continue reading...

From aviation to retail, many industries are already looking to artificial intelligence to improve productivityKeir Starmer this week announced a 50-point plan that aims to give the UK world leader status in artificial intelligence and grow the economy by as much as 47bn a year over a decade.The multibillion-pound investment, which seeks to create a 20-fold increase in the amount of AI computing power under public control by 2030, has been framed as a gamechanger for businesses and public organisations. Continue reading...

Despite security concerns, Americans are flooding the app, where Chinese users are welcoming them with open arms - and Luigi Mangione memesCute cats. Fit checks. Travel vlogs. Luigi Mangione latte art. Americans who downloaded RedNote saw it all this week, as they fled to the Chinese social media app in advance of an imminent (or not ) TikTok ban.English language content has flooded RedNote, whose default language is Mandarin, with Americans posting introductions to themselves and kicking off cross-cultural discussions: How much do you pay for groceries? What Chinese slang do I need to know? Do you have any opinions about the state of Ohio? Continue reading...

President-elect has warm spot' for platform and wants political solution to preserve app but protect data'

The latest in the Like a Dragon series of Japanese crime drama is taking an improbably nautical turn - but its makers want you to know that it's still got heartIn May last year, an anonymous forum poster shared details of what they claimed would be the next game in the Like a Dragon series, the Japanese gangster drama with a unique spirit of melodrama and ridiculousness. It would star the series' most theatrical, violent villain, Goro Mad Dog" Majima, as a pirate with amnesia, and it was called Project Madlantis. This leak went under the radar, quite possibly because it sounded so silly that nobody would believe it. But then, at 2024's Tokyo Game Show in September, Sega surprised everyone by announcing exactly this. It is called Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. That's it. That's the game.Madlantis sounds like a theme night at a noughties student bar, but is in fact the game's pirate hub, a nautical Vegas where captains battle and bet on each other in coliseum face-offs. Ships are outfitted with cannon and pistols, but also machine guns and rocket launchers. Sailing the seas around Hawaii, avoiding lightning strikes during storms, Captain Majima can let go of the wheel of the ship and heft an RPG on to his shoulder to blow up an enemy craft. Boarding another vessel results in a fight between crews, which, given all the tricorn hats and outlandish costumes, looks like a punch-up between a bunch of extras from an 80s music video. Continue reading...

As factchecking attempts end, Meta's platforms will become a wasteland of fake news and misinformationMark Zuckerberg craves one metric more than any other: engagement, the statistic that tracks how long social media users spend scrolling, clicking, commenting, and viewing ads. More engagement, more profit. The Meta CEO will do almost anything to keep users online for an extra two minutes - even, it seems, surrender his websites to a flood of fake news.On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that his company plans to fire its US factcheckers and weaken its ability to moderate disinformation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. This new policy is meant to curry favor with the coming Trump administration. It's also a desperate attempt to boost engagement across all Meta's social networks. Continue reading...

Tech boss suggests move to self-learning synthetic data though some warn this could cause model collapse'

PC; Tom van den Boogaart/Sokpop

Meta's rewritten policies mean different things may be allowed to pass on Facebook, Instagram and ThreadsMeta's rewritten policies on hateful conduct" mean users will now be able to say different types of things on its platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Threads. After Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of sweeping changes to oversight of content on its platforms, multiple edits have been made to its policies.Among them are:A specific injunction against calling transgender or non-binary people it" has been deleted. A new section has been added making clear that we do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation". It said this was a reflection of political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like weird'". It also says the policies are designed to allow room for types of speech including people calling for exclusion or [using] insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration or homosexuality".Meta's policies are unchanged in saying that users should not post content targeting a person or group of people on the basis of their protected characteristics or immigration status with dehumanising speech with comparisons to animals, pathogens or sub-human life forms such as cockroaches and locusts. But the changes suggest it may now be possible to compare women to household objects or property and to compare people to faeces, filth, bacteria, viruses, diseases and primitives.It should also be possible now to say transgender people do not exist".Meta has deleted warnings against self-admission of racism, homophobia and Islamophobia. It has also deleted warnings against expressions of hate, such as calling people cunt", dick" and asshole".The changes may also mean it is acceptable to post about the China virus", a term the US president-elect, Donald Trump, has frequently used in relation to coronavirus. Continue reading...

Is technology really to blame for bad behaviour, or is something else afoot?People who walk along the street with their heads down, staring at their phones, are enemies of society. They are narcissistic babies who have unilaterally derogated from the social contract that says you should look where you're going to make sure you don't bump into people. They implicitly believe that others should do that cognitive work for them while they shuffle along scrolling for porn or doom. If, however, a normal person bumps into them they will be enraged at the unpleasant reminder that other human beings exist outside their solipsistic bubble. Meanwhile, they are walking so slowly that everyone behind them, too, is inconvenienced; they are prime contributors to urban congestion and alienation and the general breakdown of the fabric of society.All that is true enough, but The Extinction of Experience has a lot ofother complaints about modern technology. Young folk these days can't do joined-up handwriting, and taking lecture notes on laptops is worse for their understanding. People photograph their food in restaurants and themselves in tourist hotspots. People don't stare into space while waiting any more. We are losing the knack for analogue, face-to-face communication. Continue reading...

Comments by co-chair of oversight board Helle Thorning-Schmidt come as X CEO welcomes rival's moveThe co-chair of Meta's oversight board said the company's systems had become too complex", as the chief executive of Elon Musk's X welcomed its decision to scrap factcheckers.Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the co-chair of the social media company's oversight board and the former prime minister of Denmark, has said she and the departed president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, had agreed Meta systems have been too complex", adding that there had been over-enforcement". Continue reading...

Government announces new contracts to install gigabit level fibre coverage for 131,000 households and businessesThe last corners of England and Wales yet to be covered by a 5bn push to widen fast broadband could finally get access to rapid downloads, streaming and video calls after the government announced 289m in new taxpayer-funded contracts enabling coverage.After some people in broadband blackspots were forced to turn to Elon Musk's Starlink satellite-enabled internet connections, the latest deals to boost connectivity should give 131,000 households and businesses in village and rural internet deserts gigabit-level fibre coverage - allowing a high-definition movie to be downloaded in around a minute. Continue reading...

Instagram profile of proud Black queer momma', created by Meta, said her development team included no Black peopleMeta is deleting Facebook and Instagram profiles of AI characters the company created over a year ago after users rediscovered some of the profiles and engaged them in conversations, screenshots of which went viral.The company had first introduced these AI-powered profiles in September 2023 but killed off most of them by summer 2024. However, a few characters remained and garnered new interest after the Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times late last week that the company had plans to roll out more AI character profiles. Continue reading...

Settlement of proposed class-action lawsuit represent nine hours of profit for Apple, which has denied wrongdoingApple has agreed to pay $95m in cash to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant Siri violated users' privacy, listening to them without their consent.iPhone owners complained that Apple routinely recorded their private conversations after they activated Siri unintentionally, and disclosed these conversations to third parties such as advertisers. A preliminary settlement was filed on Tuesday night in the Oakland, California, federal court, and requires approval by US district judge Jeffrey White. Continue reading...

Reduced European subsidies, a US shift to lower-priced hybrids and Chinese competition have squeezed EV makerTesla reported its first decline in annual deliveries on Thursday, as the automaker handed over fewer-than-expected electric vehicles in the fourth quarter and incentives failed to boost demand for its ageing lineup of models. The company failed to meet quarterly delivery targets multiple times in 2024.Deliveries for 2024 were 1.79m, 1.1% lower than a year ago, below estimates of 1.806m units, according to 19 analysts polled by LSEG. Tesla moved 495,570 vehicles in the three months to 31 December, missing estimates of 503,269 units, according to 15 analysts polled by LSEG. Tesla delivered 471,930 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles and 23,640 units of other models, including the Model S sedan, Cybertruck and Model X premium SUV. It produced 459,445 vehicles during the October-December period. Continue reading...

Billionaire ally of Donald Trump also accuses Keir Starmer on X of failing to prosecute child rapists in OldhamElon Musk has caused anger by calling for the release of Tommy Robinson and accusing Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute child rapists in Oldham in Greater Manchester.The billionaire ally of Donald Trump pinned a message at the top of his X feed overnight saying Free Tommy Robinson!", tagging the far-right activist who is in jail for contempt of court. Continue reading...

Motion-sensor software sent alerts to prevent lighting up at most vulnerable moments for those trying to quitSmartwatches could be used to help people quit smoking, a study suggests.Researchers have developed pioneering motion sensor software that can detect the typical hand movements that occur when someone is holding a cigarette. Continue reading...

Company's share price has risen twentyfold after it changed its strategy to become first bitcoin treasury company'In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic upended economies around the world, an obscure US software firm decided to diversify. MicroStrategy, whose head office is situated next to a shopping mall and metro station in Tysons Corner, Virginia, had decided the steady business of software as a service" was not racy enough.Instead, it would branch out by investing up to $250m in alternative assets - stocks, bonds, commodities such as gold, digital assets such as bitcoin or other asset types". Continue reading...

While we certainly don't encourage people to turn away from the news, we also know it's important to take breaksDoomscrolling happens to the best of us. Algorithms across social platforms are finely tuned to feed you content and posts that keep you locked in. It can be hard to pull yourself away even when you're consuming a barrage of news about the state of the world online.While we certainly don't encourage people to turn away from the news, we also know it's important to take breaks. A recent MIT study found that social media can create a negative feedback loop: those who are already struggling with their mental health are more likely to consume negative content, which makes their mental health worse. Continue reading...

Tech selloffs not only cost tax revenue and jobs, but are turning the UK into a vassal stateThere is much to admire about the US. The great French social observer Alexis de Tocqueville, nearly 200 years ago, lauded its commitment to civic virtue, individual self-improvement and hard work - legacies of its puritan founders.Those traits are still evident today, but alongside them a darker one has emerged. The US, the hegemon of the 20th century still committed to democracy, has changed. It has transmuted into an imperial power careless of democracy but ever readier to exact economic tribute from its vassal states. Continue reading...

The new US president will almost certainly bring unpredictability but several themes will dominate the year ahead. Observer writers offer their guide on what lies ahead in politics, film, fashion, sport and moreThe only thing that can be predicted with absolute certainty about Donald Trump's second term as US president is that it will be unpredictable. Trump does not really know what he wants to do on a range of issues. He talks a good game, which is how he got re-elected. But he often seems to decide policy on the basis of what the last person he spoke to told him. Is he serious about mobilising the military to carry out mass deportations of illegal" migrants? Will he use the justice department to hunt down political enemies and media critics? Will he impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports and trigger aglobal trade war? Or will he act with greater circumspection, using these threats as bargaining tools? Who knows? Hedoesn't yet. Continue reading...

Checking my emails at every possible opportunity had become distracting and draining. So I set myself new boundariesAs a freelance writer, the structure of my work day can often vary wildly. Sometimes, it feels as if I have too much to do - other days, too little.Yet no matter the shape of my 9to 5, one thing remains constant: emails. I receive about 100 a day, ranging from the inane (Tesco Clubcard updates) to the infuriating (the PR who keeps sending me the fluctuating numbers of Taylor Swift's Instagram following) and the important (editors, often wondering when the piece they have asked me to write mightmaterialise). Continue reading...

My anxiety about not replying to everyone's messages was at a constant simmer until I created proper boundariesI feel as if I've lost days of my life to digital causes. Even though I'm an extrovert, the near-constant drip of WhatsApp communications can drain me; my anxiety over not replying instantly to everyone is at constant simmer. Add to that the element of performance, and the worry that proving you care is measured in the messages you send ... and it can all get too much.Where has Remona gone?" panicked one friend, when I went awol while juggling a deadline, babysitting, and hosting house guests. The pile-up of 248 unread messages in one group alone - inclusive of podcast-length voice notes - made me feel like a bad person for being absent. Sometimes, I'm happy to be entirely mute - as I was in one unnecessarily large group I was added to without consent. I went unnoticed for years amid unsolicited selfies of people I barely knew and forwarded messages that had to be forwarded further or you'd face some disaster, until someone realised I was lurking and outed me in front of all 43 members. I was mortified. Continue reading...

After one too many moany voicenotes and streams of incessant notifications, I knew something had to changeThough my internal age is set to about 28, the time when I feel profoundly 43 is when I get nostalgic for things rendered obsolete by technology. One of those things was being able to go on holiday without being continually contacted, because the price of sending a text message was the same as a glass of wine. WhatsApp has obliterated that.Over the past year, I've noticed how much harder it has been to switch off as a result of the incessant flow of information. I have walked in the Polish countryside foraging for mushrooms under a crisp blue sky, while listening to a friend's voice note about their work worries in minute detail. After I spent a glorious day out with my 10-year-old niece in Barcelona, eating dumplings and buying stickers, a friend decided to share a non-urgent but emotionally difficult update about a mutual friend's bad health. While I was in the Maldives, after I had watched a stingray glide below me in a cobalt-blue ocean, a cousin sent me a rundown of a date where the guy had sneezed all over her food.Poorna Bell is a freelance journalist and author of Chase the RainbowDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

The 76-year-old is part of a trend of silver influencers' whose success in the face of adversity resonates strongly. Could she be Elon's secret weapon in China?Maye Musk is a busy woman. As well as being the mother of the world's richest man, she has been jetting between various glamorous events - many of them in China. In December alone, she attended a gala dinner in Hangzhou, walked the red carpet for a cosmetics company in Wuhan and signed copies of the Chinese edition of her book, A Woman Makes a Plan, which she described as a bestseller" in China.In fact, the only Musk-related book on the Chinese bestseller lists in October was a biography of her son Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Elon Musk is popular in China, and is thought to have the potential to wield pro-Beijing influence in the otherwise hawkish incoming administration of Donald Trump. But he has also faced scrutiny for his links to the US Department of Defense via his aerospace company, SpaceX. Continue reading...

A timeline of events in the year of Elon Musk shows how omnipresent he has become, how his X feed has become as unavoidable as Donald Trump's wasHello, and welcome to Techscape. I've been pondering screen-time and isolation after I suffered through a recent bout of Covid. Even a few days of seclusion coupled with lengthy, uninterrupted spates of staring at screens were enough to return me to the state of mind in which I spent most of 2020. I hope all of you reading have a wonderful winter and new year, filled with the opposite of that experience: family, friends, and cheery, in-person parties.Today in Techscape: We look back at the biggest tech story of 2024, Elon Musk, and at the Amazon workers strike in the US. Continue reading...

Female athlete power on social media became ever more strident in 2024 - but the backlash also damaged careers and wellbeingLina Nielsen remembers the moment she had the idea. She was sitting around the Olympic Village in Paris with her sprinting teammates - and she was bored. I said to Yemi Mary John: I'm gonna make this TikTok'," Nielsen recalls. She took herself to her bedroom, got out the flip phone each athlete had been given and typed into an Excel spreadsheet: Where you at? Holla at me."Her five-second spoof of Kelly Rowland's music-video texting fail took hardly longer than that to make. It also got 8m views. It's funny that the videos that do that best are the ones you don't put any effort in," says Nielsen with a laugh. She is still trying to make sense of the fact that her TikTok channel was the most popular of any British athlete at the Games, beating even the knit-tastic Tom Daley in second place. At the end of the Olympic fortnight her channels had been viewed by more than the Australian and German teams combined. Continue reading...

Jorge Rivera-Herrans's musical sensation Epic is just one of a series of works making a splash on the online platformWhen Jorge Rivera-Herrans released part of Epic: the Musical last Christmas, he managed to push Taylor Swift off the top of the US iTunes album charts. So there is a lot at stake when the final instalment of his musical retelling of the Odyssey is released on Christmas Day.Rivera-Herrans's project has already been an extraordinary success, with more monthly listeners on Spotify (1.6m) than veterans such as Morrissey, Liam Gallagher, or the Sex Pistols, and 119m plays on the platform in the past 28 days alone. Continue reading...

Social media firm apologises to those affected by blackout on Wednesday, after more than 100,000 complaintsMeta has said it is 99% of the way there" in solving a social media blackout with its apps, which caused issues with Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.At about 10pm GMT on Wednesday, monitoring website Downdetector said there had been 23,445 reports of Facebook outages, 11,466 for Instagram and 18,646 for WhatsApp across Britain, while in the US all three sites seemed largely unaffected. Continue reading...

The archeologist heads to Vatican City and the Egyptian Pyramids in this unconventional blockbuster, for lots of cleverly designed stealth, combat and puzzle-solving funMaking an Indiana Jones game today seems like a straightforward endeavour: you take Uncharted's Nathan Drake, send him back in time 80-odd years, give him a fedora and a bullwhip and sit back and watch the golden idols roll in. The Uncharted developer Naughty Dog perfected the template for Indy-inspired globetrotting action games more than a decade ago, and nobody would blame Swedish studio MachineGames if it stuck to it.Indiana Jones and the Great Circle opts not to. Instead, it often goes out of its way to frustrate such comparisons. This unconventional blockbuster has more in common with games such as Dishonored and Hitman than it does with Uncharted. Sure, it has action and spectacle and occasionally dabbles in platforming, but it places far greater emphasis on puzzles, open-ended stealth, and letting you beat the snot out of fascists while dressed as a priest. Continue reading...

Brain rot' is the Oxford word of the year - a fitting choice, given the startling impact the internet is having on our grey matterIf you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and type the words skibidi toilet" into YouTube. The 11-second video features an animated human head protruding from a toilet bowl while singing the nonsensical lyrics skibidi dop dop dop yes yes". The clip has been viewed more than 215m times, and spawned hundreds of millions of references on TikTok and other social media.Fitting, then, that the Oxford word of the year has just been announced as brain rot". As an abstract concept, brain rot is something we're all vaguely aware of. The dictionary defines it as the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging". But few people are aware of how literally technology is rotting our brains, and how decisively compulsive internet use is destroying our grey matter.Sian Boyle is a freelance journalist Continue reading...

About 1.4 million people have left online dating in the past year as experts say users see it as a chore rather than social activityAbout 1.4 million people in the UK have left the online dating scene in the past 12 months, but is that a sign that the apps don't work or that people are turning away from dating altogether?Ofcom's 2024 Online Nation report shows that dating app use declined significantly between 2023 and 2024, with a drop of nearly 16% in the use of the top 10 most popular dating apps this year. Continue reading...

10% of Facebook's UK workforce was axed while revenue fell slightly but pre-tax profits rose despite advertising slowdownFacebook cut more than 700 employees in the UK last year at a cost of 79m, after parent company Meta embarked on its first ever round of redundancies as part of a global cost-cutting drive to offset a disastrous collapse in revenues.The company - which is one of the most valuable US tech companies behind Apple, the Google owner Alphabet, and Amazon - also reduced its UK tax bill to just over 12% of its pre-tax profits, half the standard 25% corporation tax rate. Continue reading...

The mobile phones we loved then lost are honoured by an online archive which reveals history of bestselling brandEveryone remembers their first Nokia," says Mark Mason, who joined the telecoms company's design team back in its 1990s heyday. When you say the name, it evokes a memory."This is not as hyperbolic as it sounds - in 1998, the Finnish consumer electronics company was the bestselling phone brand in the world, with 40% of the world market and 70% of the UK market. Continue reading...

One far-right cell wanted to use 3D-printed guns to cause maximum confusion and fear' on the streets of Finland. Could the police intercept them in time?Long before he started making guns with a 3D printer, Viljam Nyman was a kid who was bullied. In a document police later found on his computer, titled The life story of how I became a far-right extremist", Nyman described his childhood in Lahti, a city in southern Finland, being picked on by other kids and feeling abandoned by the adults around him. He wrote that this experience taught him something: Be yourself' or don't care' were really bad pieces of advice. Violence and power, or the threat of using it, were actually the things that mattered. Equality and accepting difference were just words on paper, naive and idealistic fantasies. Human nature, in reality, was discriminatory and racist."In 2005, when Nyman was 11, violent protests broke out in a number of European countries after a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in response to a debate about Islam and self-censorship. Why was it, Nyman wondered, that he was mocked for being different and no one did anything about it, but criticising a religion from faraway countries was off limits? He wrote in the document that all of this" reinforced his belief that something was wrong with society and no one was on his side. Nyman became obsessed with Hitler and Nazi Germany. He began with the notion that bullies could be classified as subhuman and sent to camps, but became fascinated by the discipline and order of the Third Reich. As he got older, he immersed himself in online message boards that shared antisemitic theories. Until this point, Nyman had spent a lot of time playing video games. Now, he thought, he needed to do more so that he would not be a disgrace to the white race. He started to feel something he had not felt before: a sense of purpose. Continue reading...

FEC filings offer only a glimpse of the money tech is pouring into Washington as it seeks to influence governmentSilicon Valley poured more than $394.1m into the US presidential election this year, according to a Guardian analysis, the bulk of it coming from an enormous donation of about $243m Elon Musk made to Donald Trump's campaign.The analysis of new election data from the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows the increasingly heavy influence of the tech industry in US elections. Advocates of cryptocurrency were particularly active in this election as they fought to stave off regulation, pumping money into the presidential campaigns and key congressional races.$242.6m from Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) who has an estimated net worth of $350bn.$5.5m from Marc Andreessen, the billionaire founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. Andreessen's co-founder, Ben Horowitz, initially supported Trump but flipped to Harris.$5.1m from Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp who made the bulk of his fortune when Facebook acquired the messaging app in 2014 for $19bn.$51.1m from the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who left the social media company in 2008 to start the workflow software company Asana.$17m from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn.$11.7m from Chris Larsen, the billionaire chair of Ripple, a cryptocurrency company. Continue reading...

The billionaire, having helped Trump regain the White House, is reportedly turning his interest to BritainElon Musk appears to have many obsessions. The world's richest man is evangelical about electric vehicles, space travel and Donald Trump. Another of his interests may yet have profound consequences for the UK: British politics.The billionaire is reported to be thinking of becoming the biggest donor in history with a rumoured 80m payment to Nigel's Farage's Reform UK party. Continue reading...

Decision is latest twist in a years-long battle between the social media company and the US governmentTikTok is one step closer to facing a ban in the US. A federal appeals court ruled on Friday to uphold a law that forces the hugely popular social media company to sell its assets to a non-Chinese company or be barred from the country entirely. The decision is the latest twist in a years-long battle between the US government and TikTok, which is owned by Chinese-based ByteDance.ByteDance has until 19 January to sell the app or face the ban. Continue reading...

Name was mistakenly flagged and prevented from appearing in responses, says chatbot's developerLast weekend the name was all over the internet - just not on ChatGPT.David Mayer became famous for a moment on social media because the popular chatbot appeared to want nothing to do with him. Continue reading...

Report by committee of experts also calls for doctors to ask about screen time during checkupsSmartphones sold in Spain should carry a label warning users about their potential health impacts, experts have told the Spanish government, in a report that calls for doctors to ask about screen time during checkups.As Spain pushes forward with a draft law to limit children's exposure to technology, the 50-member committee of experts has also called for minors to have limited exposure to digital devices until they are 13 to mitigate what they see as a public health problem. Continue reading...