Artificial intelligence will be the main talking point at the coming London Tech Week but investment and skills problems remainFor some companies attending London Tech Week this Monday, just being there is an achievement. The sudden failure in March of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a financial cornerstone for the UK and US tech industries, had left many British companies wondering how they were going to see out that month.Ashley Ramrachia, chief executive of Academy, a tech company with headquarters in Manchester, said the first he knew of SVB’s troubles was on Wednesday 8 March. By Thursday, Ramrachia and others were trying, unsuccessfully, to withdraw funds. By Friday, the Bank of England said it planned to put SVB’s UK operation into insolvency and Ramrachia was one of 3,500 customers in Britain scrambling to deal with the consequences. Continue reading...
Silicon chip transistors are so small they are approaching their physical limits. And the firm that makes many of them may be somewhat hampered if Xi Jinping decides to invade TaiwanIn the 1950s I spent a significant chunk of my pocket money buying a transistor. It was a small metal cylinder (about 5mm in diameter and 7mm deep) with three wires protruding from its base. I needed it for a little radio I was building, and buying it was a big deal for a lad living in rural Ireland. My baffled parents couldn’t understand why this gizmo their son was holding between finger and thumb could be interesting; and, to be honest, you couldn’t blame them.Now spool forward six decades. The A13 processor that powers the iPhone that I used to find a photograph of that first transistor has 8.5 billion of them etched on to a sliver of silicon no bigger than a fingernail – a “chip”. The next generation of these chips will have transistors almost as small as the diameter of a human chromosome. Continue reading...
Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for an online existence has been laughed off as a corporate folly. Meanwhile, those still existing happily on a virtual world launched 20 years ago may be wondering what all the fuss is about …On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier. Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair.It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was “the first big-league CEO” to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – “the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds”. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a “region” of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf. Continue reading...
The national park ranger recalls capturing the landscape created by an eruption in La PalmaWhen the Cumbre Vieja volcano in La Palma, the Canary Islands, erupted in September 2021, it caused more than £760m of damage, forcing the evacuation of 6,000 people and killing one, an elderly man who died after inhaling toxic gases. It would be 83 days before officials declared the eruption over, on Christmas Day 2021.David del Rosario Dávila has been a national park ranger in La Palma since 2016. A self-described mountain man, he took this shot in the area surrounding the eruption in late October 2022, just over a year after it had begun. “The location and landscape were created by the eruption, making it one of the youngest areas on the planet,” Del Rosario Dávila says. “Everything you see in this photograph is new. The dead trees are from a pine forest that used to exist there; the mountain is made from ash from the volcano.” Continue reading...
Meeting is expected to discuss ‘internationally coordinated action’ to mitigate risks posed by artificial intelligenceRishi Sunak has announced that the UK will host a global summit on safety in artificial intelligence in the autumn, as fears grow that the technology’s rapid advancement could spin out of control.Safety concerns are mounting after breakthroughs in generative AI, which can produce convincing text, images and even voice on command, with tech executives such as Elon Musk among the figures expressing alarm. Here is a look at what the summit might achieve. Continue reading...
A new wave of sex toys is designed to combine orgasmic joy with relief from dryness, tension and painAt first glance, it could be mistaken for a chunky bracelet or hi-tech fitness tracker. But the vibrations delivered by this device will not alert you to a new message or that you have hit your daily step goal. Neither are they strictly intended for your wrist.Welcome to the future of vibrators, designed not only for sexual pleasure, but to tackle medical problems such as vaginal dryness, or a painful and inflamed prostate gland in men. Continue reading...
Meta targeting Oprah Winfrey and Dalai Lama as potential users of ‘sanely run’ social networking platformMark Zuckerberg’s Meta is pushing ahead with plans to launch a rival to Twitter because public figures reportedly want a similar platform that is “sanely run”, with the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey on the target list for users.The standalone app is codenamed Project92 and its public name could be Threads, according to a report by the tech news site the Verge. Continue reading...
Regulators have been confused about whether cryptocurrency is a security or a commodity, but clarity appears imminentFor years, US financial regulators couldn’t agree on what to do about cryptocurrency. They wanted to do something, but couldn’t agree on what crypto was – a security, like a stock or bond, or a commodity, like a raw material or agricultural product, or neither? – and which agency would have jurisdiction.This week, Gary Gensler, a longtime critic of crypto and the chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), appears to have found the answer – by launching a crackdown on crypto exchanges, the platforms on which investors buy and sell digital currencies. Continue reading...
Under the proposal, service providers would have to prevent the dissemination of harmful and illegal information, save records and report their discoveriesChina is planning to restrict and scrutinise the use of wireless filesharing services between mobile devices, such as airdrop and Bluetooth, after they were used by protesters to evade censorship and spread protest messages.The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator, has released draft regulations on “close-range mesh network services” and launched a month-long public consultation on Tuesday. Continue reading...
Employees get preview of chatbots similar to ChatGPT for Messenger and WhatsAppFacebook’s owner, Meta, announced new artificial intelligence-focused tools in an internal company meeting on Thursday and outlined its plan after months of financial struggle.The company confirmed a New York Times report that employees were given a sneak peek of new products it has been building, including ChatGPT-like chatbots planned for Messenger and WhatsApp that could converse using different personas. Continue reading...
Tech companies remain secretive over the amount of energy and water it takes to train their complex programs and modelsOne question that ChatGPT can’t quite answer: how much energy do you consume?“As an AI language model, I don’t have a physical presence or directly consume energy,” it’ll say, or: “The energy consumption associated with my operations is primarily related to the servers and infrastructure used to host and run the model.” Continue reading...
Amazon denies union claim it drafted in 1,300 extra workers to thwart push for formal recognition at Coventry warehouseThe GMB has reluctantly withdrawn its attempt to win formal union recognition at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse, accusing the firm of drafting in more than 1,000 extra workers to skew the decision.GMB members at the site made a formal request for recognition to the independent central arbitration committee (CAC) last month after a concerted recruitment drive for members that it believed took it past the necessary threshold of support. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier, Hollie Richardson a on (#6C3TW)
In this week’s newsletter: From ‘lab leak’ theories to market stalls rumours, former BBC China correspondent John Sudworth investigates in Fever. Plus: five of the best podcasts for fathers
But whistleblower says 2013 surveillance ‘child’s play’ compared to technology todayEdward Snowden has warned that surveillance technology is so much more advanced and intrusive today it makes that used by US and British intelligence agencies he revealed in 2013 look like child’s play.In an interview on the 10th anniversary of his revelations about the scale of surveillance – some of it illegal – by the US National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, he said he had no regrets about what he had done and cited positive changes. Continue reading...
From October, firms will also have to offer new buyers a ‘cooling off’ period before they investCrypto firms must warn customers they should not expect protection if their investment goes wrong and introduce a “cooling off” period for first-time investors, under new rules imposed by the UK financial watchdog.The Financial Conduct Authority said that from 8 October firms promoting crypto products or services would need to carry a clear risk warning in their adverts. Continue reading...
The Stanford Internet Observatory documented how a web of social media accounts advertises and distributes abuse materialsMark Zuckerberg’s Meta has set up a taskforce to investigate claims that Instagram is hosting the distribution and sale of self-generated child sexual abuse material, with the platform’s algorithms helping advertise illicit content.The move by the Facebook parent comes after a report from the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) that found a web of social media accounts, which appear to be operated by minors, advertising self-generated child sexual abuse material (SG-CSAM). Continue reading...
PM uses Washington visit to push Britain as global centre for technology and seek US involvement in safety summitRishi Sunak has used a trip to Washington to push the UK as a global centre for artificial intelligence regulation, insisting its record in the sector will make others listen to “this mid-sized country”.Downing Street is hopeful that Joe Biden, whom Sunak was to meet at the White House on Thursday, will agree to US involvement in a UK-hosted global summit on AI safety in the autumn. Continue reading...
A cybercrime group has exploited a flaw in MOVEit software and is demanding a ransomBritish Airways, Boots and the BBC have been hit with an ultimatum to begin ransom negotiations from a cybercrime group after employees’ personal data was stolen in a hacking attack.It emerged on Wednesday the gang behind a piece of ransomware known as Clop had posted the demand to its darkweb site, where stolen data is typically released if payments are not made by the victims. Continue reading...
Zelda opens up an endless world of possibility, Street Fighter delivers another KO and Star Wars finally gets the game it deserves. We round up the top releases of the past six monthsNintendo Switch
Ruling party accessed user data including Sim card ID and IP addresses, former executive alleges in legal filingA former executive at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has alleged that the Chinese Communist party accessed user data from the social video app belonging to Hong Kong protesters and civil rights activists.Yintao Yu, a former head of engineering at ByteDance’s US operation, claimed in a legal filing that a committee of Communist party members accessed TikTok data that included the users’ network information, Sim card identifications and IP addresses in a bid to identify the individuals and their locations. Continue reading...
The whistleblower forced US intelligence agencies to admit extensive spying on their own citizens. Some reforms were enacted but Snowden still faces potentially 30 years in prisonIt was the day his life changed forever. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on mass surveillance by the US government, he traded a comfortable existence in Hawaii, the paradise of the Pacific, for indefinite exile in Russia, now a pariah in much of the world.But 10 years after Snowden was identified as the source of the biggest National Security Agency (NSA) leak in history, it is less clear whether America underwent a similarly profound transformation in its attitude to safeguarding individual privacy. Was his act of self-sacrifice worth it – did he make a difference? Continue reading...
Sam Altman is among the most vocal supporters of artificial intelligence, but is also leading calls to regulate it. He outlines his vision of a very uncertain futureWhen I meet Sam Altman, the chief executive of AI research laboratory OpenAI, he is in the middle of a world tour. He is preaching that the very AI systems he and his competitors are building could pose an existential risk to the future of humanity – unless governments work together now to establish guide rails, ensuring responsible development over the coming decade.In the subsequent days, he and hundreds of tech leaders, including scientists and “godfathers of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, as well as Google’s DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, put out a statement saying that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”. It is an all-out effort to convince world leaders that they are serious when they say that “AI risk” needs concerted international effort. Continue reading...
The new product is far ahead of its competition; however, it is not clear that there is a pressing need for it or that most people can afford itAs people begin to report on their hands-on time with Apple’s Vision Pro VR headset, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the company has produced an incredible piece of hardware.Even in limited demonstrations, users have praised the company’s extraordinary work producing the two postage-stamp-sized screens that sit in each eyepiece and pack in more pixels than a 4K TV; they’ve been stunned by the quality of the “passthrough” video, which shows wearers what’s happening in the outside world in enough detail that they can even use their phones while wearing the headset; and they’ve been impressed by the casual ease with which the gesture controls on the new hardware work, with an array of infrared cameras letting users make small and subtle hand movements to select and scroll rather than relying on bulky controllers. Continue reading...
Securities and Exchange Commission sues platform for allegedly operating as unregistered brokerThe US Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Coinbase, the largest American cryptocurrency exchange, for operating as an “unregistered broker, exchange and clearing agency” in violation of US securities regulations.The lawsuit follows a similar action against Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, launched by the regulator on Monday. Continue reading...
There’s a disconnect between the eye-watering price of Apple’s new ‘spatial computing’ gadget and the promise of it – but it has some genuinely novel features• Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereYesterday, Apple finally confirmed the worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley, and announced the Vision Pro, its $3,499 virtual reality headset. From our story:The headset allows users to interact with “apps and experiences”, the Apple vice-president of human interface design, Alan Dye, said, in an augmented reality (AR) version of their own surroundings or in a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) space.“Apple Vision Pro relies solely on your eyes, hands and voice,” Dye said. “You browse the system simply by looking. App icons come to life when you look at them; simply tap your fingers together to select, and gently flick to scroll.”EyeSight, which sounded so ridiculous, could actually … work? A curved, outward-facing OLED screen displays the wearer’s eyes to the outside world, giving the impression of the headset as a simple piece of translucent glass. The screen mists over if the wearer is in a fully immersive VR space, while allowing people to have (simulated, at least) eye contact when in AR mode.An array of downward and outward-pointing IR cameras let the headset keep track of your position and gestures at all times, allowing the company to build a controller-free experience without requiring the wearer to hold their hands in their eye-line when using the headset.An AI-powered “persona” (don’t call it an avatar) stands in for you when you make a video call using the Vision Pro. It’s a photorealistic attempt to animate a real picture of you, using the data the headset captures of your eye, mouth and hand movements while you talk. Even in the staged demos, it looked slightly uncanny, but it seems a far smaller hurdle to introduce into the world than trying to encourage people to have business meetings with their Memoji.Should VR headsets have a bulky battery mounted on your head, or should they rely on a tethered cable to a separate PC? Apple thinks there’s a third option: slip the bulky battery in your back pocket, and run the cable up to a lighter, more comfortable set of goggles. It could work. Or it could be the worst of both worlds: a cable that still inhibits movement and comfort, with none of the power of a real tethered VR system. Hey, not all novelty is a slam-dunk. Continue reading...
Cries of ‘stupid autocorrect!’ will be banished as a result of an AI-powered upgrade that will let users swear if they want toApple has announced it will upgrade its autocorrect feature that annoyingly corrects one of the most common expletives to “ducking”.“In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino on Monday. Continue reading...
by Kiran Stacey Political correspondent on (#6C2EN)
Exclusive: party calls for developers without a licence to be barred from working on advanced AI toolsThe UK should bar technology developers from working on advanced artificial intelligence tools unless they have a licence to do so, Labour has said.Ministers should introduce much stricter rules around companies training their AI products on vast datasets of the kind used by OpenAI to build ChatGPT, Lucy Powell, Labour’s digital spokesperson, told the Guardian. Continue reading...
Headset priced at $3,500 allows users to ‘browse the system simply by looking’ and tapping their fingers to select, says AppleApple has lifted the lid on the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley and revealed the Vision Pro, a $3,499 VR headset.“With Vision Pro, you’re no longer limited by a display. Your surroundings become an infinite canvas,” the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, said. “Vision Pro blends digital content into the space around us. It will introduce us to Spatial Computing.” Continue reading...
Hack attributed to criminal gang hit MOVEit software used by third-party payroll provider ZellisBritish Airways, Boots and the BBC are investigating the potential theft of personal details of staff after the companies were hit by a cyber-attack attributed to a Russia-linked criminal gang.BA confirmed it was one of the companies affected by the hack, which targeted software called MOVEit used by Zellis, a payroll provider. Continue reading...
by Lisa O'Carroll Brussels correspondent on (#6C287)
Call comes amid moves to combat disinformation from Russia, while Twitter is warned to comply with new digital content lawsSocial media companies including Google and Facebook have been urged by the EU to “immediately” start labelling content and images generated by artificial intelligence as part of a package of moves to combat fake news and disinformation from Russia.At the same time, the EU has warned Twitter that it faces “swift” sanctions if it does not comply with new digital content laws that come into effect across the bloc on 25 August. Continue reading...
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington on (#6C1X8)
Users of the social media app have faced legal consequences for posts – some private – that are critical of Saudi authoritiesSaudi state media issued an explicit warning that it is a criminal offense to “insult” authorities using social media apps such as Snapchat, the California-based messaging app whose chief executive recently forged a new “cooperation” deal with the kingdom’s culture ministry.The threat – which was originally televised in April and then deleted – has gained new resonance as more cases emerge in which Snapchat users and influencers in the kingdom have been arrested by authorities and, in some cases, sentenced to decades-long prison sentences. Continue reading...
There was a known fault with screens, but the free repair only applies to models produced earlierRecently my three-year-old £1,300 Apple MacBook Pro’s backlight stopped working, rendering the screen completely black and usable. The laptop still works if attached to another screen, so the computer itself is clearly fine.When I took my device into an Apple store, the technician kindly informed me that the problem I am having is a repeated, known one with 13-in MacBook Pro laptops and that Apple has a service programme that offers to fix these affected screens for free. Continue reading...
by Kari Paul and Maanvi Singh in San Francisco on (#6C1W5)
The billionaire’s record has raised concerns over Neuralink’s ability to responsibly oversee the development of such an invasive deviceElon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink last week received regulatory approval to conduct the first clinical trial of its experimental device in humans. But the billionaire executive’s bombastic promotion of the technology, his leadership record at other companies and animal welfare concerns relating to Neuralink experiments have raised alarm.“I was surprised,” said Laura Cabrera, a neuroethicist at Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute about the decision by the US Food and Drug Administration to let the company go ahead with clinical trials. Continue reading...
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsWhat are the best defunct products and overlooked innovations? Brian Phipps, SheffieldSend new questions to nq@theguardian.com. Continue reading...
Security services fear the new technology could be used to groom vulnerable peopleThe creators of artificial intelligence need to abandon their “tech utopian” mindset, according to the terror watchdog, amid fears that the new technology could be used to groom vulnerable individuals.Jonathan Hall KC, whose role is to review the adequacy of terrorism legislation, said the national security threat from AI was becoming ever more apparent and the technology needed to be designed with the intentions of terrorists firmly in mind. Continue reading...
In a giant factory in California, thousands of screens, PCs and other old or unwanted gadgets are picked apart for materials. But what about the billions of other defunct (or not) devices?In the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on the nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand Sequoia national park. But you can’t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter (not to mention the ceiling clearance issue), so the tourist board has deemed it fit to build these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my phone and take a picture, amused and somewhat appalled. What will live longer, I wonder: the real trees or the fakes?I haven’t come to Fresno to see the trees; I’ve come about the device on which I took the picture. In a warehouse in the south of the city, green trucks are unloading pallets of old electronics through the doors of Electronics Recyclers International (ERI), the largest electronics recycling company in the US. Continue reading...
Experts say the fallout from powerful AI will be less a nuclear bomb and more a creeping deterioration of societyAlarm over artificial intelligence has reached a fever pitch in recent months. Just this week, more than 300 industry leaders published a letter warning AI could lead to human extinction and should be considered with the seriousness of “pandemics and nuclear war”.Terms like “AI doomsday” conjure up sci-fi imagery of a robot takeover, but what does such a scenario actually look like? The reality, experts say, could be more drawn out and less cinematic – not a nuclear bomb but a creeping deterioration of the foundational areas of society. Continue reading...
Since the first podcast was released two decades ago this month, the medium has upended pop culture in countless unexpected ways, from revolutionising standup comedy to providing storytelling fuel for drama and documentaryDo you remember life before podcasts? Yes, obviously, is likely to be the short answer. Podcasting is still a relatively youthful medium, after all. In fact, it is exactly 20 years this month since the format’s invention: Open Source – a politics and culture discussion show hosted by the journalist Christopher Lydon – debuted in the summer of 2003, and is widely considered the first ever podcast. (Not that it was actually called podcasting at that point; the term was coined the following year by Ben Hammersley in an article for the Guardian.)Yet if you are one of the approximately 20 million people in the UK who listen to podcasts – and especially if you’re a heavy user like me (I listen while I am cleaning, cooking, eating, walking, on the bus, having a bath – essentially anything that doesn’t engage my word brain) – the art form will have subtly but comprehensively changed the flavour of your everyday life. For many of us, podcasts have become constant companions, fostering parasocial relationships, exposing us to candid conversations and unearthing thrilling, sometimes salacious stories. Continue reading...
The film-maker captured her striking image while visiting a Tanzanian village healer who diagnoses patients by fair means or fowlEarlier that day, film-maker Kaja Kraska had accompanied her new friend Muanauru to the market to buy a chicken. Now, it was sitting on Muanauru’s head.It was summer 2020 and Kraska was with her husband, Mateus, in Mambo, a village in Tanzania’s Usambara mountains. They create documentaries across the world for their YouTube channel Globstory. After a first Covid lockdown that had confined them to Poland, they decided to visit Tanzania, in part because of its unusual response to the pandemic. Continue reading...
Parents and schools across Greystones adopt voluntary ‘no-smartphone code’ in bid to curb peer pressureOn the principle of strength in numbers, parents in the Irish town of Greystones have banded together to collectively tell their children they cannot have a smartphone until secondary school.Parents’ associations across the district’s eight primary schools have adopted a no-smartphone code to present a united front against children’s lobbying. Continue reading...
Roger Haines writes that there is no evidence of AI sentience, while Prof Paul Huxley recalls Asimov’s laws of robotics, and Phyl Hyde says fears of AI are being overblownRegarding Jonathan Freedland’s article about AI (The future of AI is chilling – humans have to act together to overcome this threat to civilisation, 26 May), isn’t worrying about whether an AI is “sentient” rather like worrying whether a prosthetic limb is “alive”? There isn’t even any evidence that “sentience” is a thing. More likely, like life, it is a bunch of distinct capabilities interacting, and “AI” (ie disembodied artificial intellect) is unlikely to reproduce more than a couple of those capabilities.That’s because it is an attempt to reproduce the function of just a small part of the human brain: more particularly, of the evolutionarily new part. Our motivation to pursue self-interest comes from a billion years of evolution of the old brain, which AI is not based upon. The real threat is from humans misusing AI for their own ends, and from the fact that the mechanisms we have evolved to recognise other creatures with minds like ours are (as Freedland highlighted) too easily fooled by superficial evidence.
by Nadia Khomami Arts and culture correspondent on (#6C149)
Show contestant says she did not expect the level of cruel comments about her appearanceWhen Coco Lodge decided to go on Love Island, she knew she was going to be judged on her behaviour. But what she did not expect was the level of trolling and cruel comments she received about her appearance.The 28-year-old graphic designer, who entered the ITV show as a Casa Amor bombshell last year, spent several months reckoning with her time in the Mallorca villa. Continue reading...
Right now artificial intelligence is too busy painting and giving factually spurious answers to basic questions to pose much of a threat to humanity, but in video games, AIs have gone furtherGLaDOS is surely video games’ most recognisable megalomaniacal AI, the creatively sadistic robot with a soothingly monotone, heartily evil voice that has been left in sole charge of a lab for far too long. Let’s be honest, her cheerfully murderous attitude towards humanity isn’t entirely unjustified. Continue reading...
The adverse effects on children’s mental health are well known, and pre-teens are too young to safely navigate the internetBut everyone has one,” pleads my son as his father and I tell him, for the umpteenth time, that no, he will not get a smartphone. Not now and probably not for a few more years. Despite our firm resolve, it is hard not to feel sorry for him. As the end of year 6 draws closer, the weeks are peppered with stories of new classmates whose parents have, as one friend texted recently, “cracked”. WhatsApp groups are springing up so that friends going to different secondaries can easily keep in touch. It is a world of interaction he will remain ignorant of, but, much though it pains me to see the turmoil it causes, I feel vindicated each time I read about the detrimental impact that smartphones are having on children.One report published earlier this year from the children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, revealed that nearly a third of young people will have viewed pornography by the age of 11. Such content, De Souza clarifies, will not be the equivalent of “top-shelf” material some parents may have viewed in their youth and which today would be considered quaint. It is material in which “depictions of degradation, sexual coercion, aggression and exploitation are commonplace, and disproportionately targeted against teenage girls”.Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer focusing on race, politics, education and feminism Continue reading...
Investors claim Tesla chief used Twitter, paid influencers and his TV appearance to manipulate price of cryptocurrencyElon Musk is being accused of insider trading in a proposed class action lawsuit by investors. They say the Tesla CEO manipulated the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, costing them billions of dollars.In a Wednesday night filing in Manhattan federal court, investors said Musk used Twitter posts, paid online influencers, his 2021 appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live and other “publicity stunts” to trade profitably at their expense through several Dogecoin wallets that he or Tesla controls. Continue reading...
The world’s richest person lapsed into an unusual silence on social media during his trip to the electric carmaker’s second largest marketFollowers of Elon Musk didn’t know what to expect from his trip to China. Would he speak about Tesla, a company with a large market and manufacturing footprint there? Or SpaceX, with its symbiotic relationship with the American state? Or even Twitter, the social network he bought because “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy”?The one thing no one expected: silence. Continue reading...
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