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Cassandra Naud is striking if a little opaque as a predator seducing image-obsessed tourists in ThailandIn this smartly arranged thriller by Kurtis David Harder, Canadian actor Cassandra Naud holds her own as a kind of social media Tom Ripley, out in Thailand preying on vacuous, smartphone-toting influencers while coveting their silky lifestyles. Broken down into four parts following different characters, the film dabbles in but doesn’t wholly conform to the now-standard satirical takedown of 21st-century popinjays. There’s something darker and more solipsistic at work here: Naud’s repeated spiel of “They won’t even notice you’re gone. Nobody cares” is just as rehearsed and trite as other airheaded Insta-platitudes.Her character, CW, first gets her claws into Madison (Emily Tennant), a fellow American making nice for her feeds but actually moping around the Thai coast because she’s having a hard time with her British boyfriend and manager Ryan (Rory J Saper). So when CW steps in at a bar to protect her from a sharking expat, Madison is glad to be swept into the wake of this free-spirited font of local secrets. Weeks later, she has gone missing, CW has headed to Bangkok to target Madison’s bougier and more confident clone Jessica (Sara Canning), and Ryan – rattled by the radio silence from his girlfriend – jumps on a plane. Continue reading...

Julie Inman Grant tells Senate estimates Twitter’s slowness to tackle online child abuse material is in contrast to its blocking of anti-Erdoğan tweets in the lead-up to the Turkish election

Targets include US military facilities on Guam that would be key in an Asia-Pacific conflict, say Microsoft and western spy agenciesA state-sponsored Chinese hacking group has been spying on a wide range of US critical infrastructure organisations and similar activities could be occurring globally, western intelligence agencies and Microsoft have warned.“The United States and international cybersecurity authorities are issuing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to highlight a recently discovered cluster of activity of interest associated with a People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber actor, also known as Volt Typhoon,” said a statement released by authorities in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – countries that make up the Five Eyes intelligence network. Continue reading...

What liberals may have feared as the alliance of two anti-woke villains, turned out to have the menace of a damp dishclothThe screen kept saying “Preparing to launch”. But this wasn’t one of Elon Musk’s space rockets that soars through the stratosphere and settles into a comfortable orbit. This was one that blew up on the pad in a dazzling ball of flame.The eccentric billionaire had invited Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to the somewhat niche Twitter Spaces – a dedicated audio streaming feature on the social media platform – to announce his run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. Continue reading...

Campaign to raise awareness of issues reports that 80% of those affected receive messages that are sexual in natureMillions of women who do online gaming experience harassment and have received inappropriate messages, often of a sexual nature, a report has found.A survey into online gaming reveals half (49%) of British female gamers have suffered abuse online, rising to 75% among those aged 18-24. Of those affected, 80% said the messages they got were sexual in nature. Over half (52%) of women said they felt worried about harassment. Continue reading...

Sony announces a portable streaming device for PS5 that lets players play games over wifiSony concluded its livestreamed PlayStation Showcase event on Wednesday with a 12-minute-long slice of Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man 2, PlayStation 5’s major game for 2023. It showed the heroes of the previous two games, Miles Morales and a symbiote-suited Spider-Man, working together to fight villains Kraven and the Lizard across an extensive swathe of New York scenery.The game will be out this autumn, joined by Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage on 12 October, the latest in a long-running series of historical action games. Epic Games’ Alan Wake 2, a sequel to 2010’s Stephen King-inspired horror game, was also confirmed for 17 October. Continue reading...

CMA says it is defending cloud gaming market, but Microsoft says moves ‘discourages tech innovation and investment’ in UKMicrosoft has filed an appeal against the UK competition watchdog’s decision to block its $69bn (£56bn) acquisition of the Call of Duty creator Activision Blizzard.The US tech company confirmed that it had formally lodged an appeal against the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) verdict against the deal last month. Its case will be argued before the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT). Continue reading...

Other payment companies do business with Palestinians in the occupied territories, but PayPal only provides services to Israelis thereEleven members of the US Congress have demanded PayPal end a ban on doing business with Palestinians in the occupied territories while permitting Israeli settlers to use the digital payment platform.The letter, authored by Representative Mark Pocan, says PayPal is discriminating against Palestinians by denying “equal access to the digital economy”. Continue reading...

Job cuts are part of plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 roles, bringing headcount to where it stood mid-2021Meta started carrying out the last batch of a three-part round of layoffs on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with the matter, as part of a plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 roles.Meta earlier this year became the first big tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs, after showing more than 11,000 employees the door in the fall. The cuts brought the company’s headcount down to where it stood as of about mid-2021, following a hiring spree that doubled its workforce since 2020. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: I suck at fighters, but the delightfully camp latest in the franchise is deliberately designed to be easy on new players – for once

Top multisport tracker gets bigger, crisper OLED touchscreen – but at high cost to wallet and batteryThe Forerunner 965 is Garmin’s new top of the range running and triathlon watch that comes with a crisp and bright OLED screen for the first time – but at a hefty price.The new watch tops the scales at £600 ($600/A$999) – £120 more than the LCD-equipped Forerunner 955 on which it is based. It joins the £430 Forerunner 265 and the £710 luxury Epix in Garmin’s new line of OLED sports watches. Continue reading...

Team behind ChatGPT say equivalent of atomic watchdog is needed to guard against risks of ‘superintelligent’ AIsThe leaders of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI have called for the regulation of “superintelligent” AIs, arguing that an equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency is needed to protect humanity from the risk of accidentally creating something with the power to destroy it.In a short note published to the company’s website, co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever and the chief executive, Sam Altman, call for an international regulator to begin working on how to “inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, [and] place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security” in order to reduce the “existential risk” such systems could pose. Continue reading...

The social network has floundered since the tech billionaire took over – political live streams may give the platform relevanceThe news that Ron DeSantis will launch his presidential campaign during a live Twitter appearance with Elon Musk marks the tech billionaire’s latest attempts to shore up engagement with the social network at a moment of crisis for the company.The event – which will take place Wednesday on Twitter Spaces, a live stream feature that is often broadcast at the top of Twitter’s feed – was confirmed by Musk on Tuesday afternoon. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, Musk called the Florida governor’s decision “groundbreaking” and said it won’t be the last political event that Twitter will host. Continue reading...

Caes Gruesbeck was killed earlier this month from blunt-force trauma while clearing a conveyor belt at an Indiana facilityUS regulators have launched an investigation into the death of a 20-year-old worker at an Amazon warehouse in Fort Wayne, Indiana.Caes Gruesbeck was killed on 9 May while working during his shift at the FWA4 warehouse. Gruesbeck was trying to fix a jam on an overhead conveyor when his head was struck. An Allen County coroner report ruled the fatality was caused by blunt-force trauma. Continue reading...

Paper menus were replaced by QR codes to protect diners during Covid. But the hi-tech approach has lost its appealName: QR-code menus.Age: Around for decades, mainstream for three years. Continue reading...

Stock image service Shutterstock buys gif search engine after Meta’s acquisition blocked by regulatorsThe owner of Facebook has taken a more than $260m (£210m) loss on Giphy – selling off the gif search engine to the stock image service Shutterstock for $53m after the deal was blocked by regulators.Meta said on Tuesday it is selling Giphy, the business it acquired in November 2021 for about $315m but was blocked from completing the purchase in 2022 by the UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Continue reading...

Microsoft is betting on winning business with its subscription service, Game Pass, and looking beyond markets in western Europe and east AsiaMicrosoft has been in the video game business for over 20 years, but its Xbox console has been the perpetual runner-up. 2020’s Xbox Series S/X console is being significantly outsold by Sony’s PlayStation 5 – in keeping with its predecessor, 2013’s Xbox One, which was outsold more than 2:1 by the PlayStation 4. It’s currently suffering from a lack of big-ticket exclusive games, and its most recent, Redfall, was a critical disappointment. What’s more, its huge $70bn merger with Activision Blizzard, a deal that would go a long way towards solving its content problem by buying it Call of Duty and much more, is currently being held up by UK regulators.Looking rather downtrodden on a recent episode of gaming show Xcast, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that he was “not in the business of out-consoling Sony or out-consoling Nintendo”, intimating that the long-running console war between Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation was a losing battle for Microsoft. Instead of touting Xbox sales figures, for the past few years the company has presented its subscription service Game Pass as its metric for success: how many games it has, how many subscribers, how many hours they have played. It is betting on a post-console future, on being able to play games on any screen with the help of cloud servers – a streaming and subscription-centric future that has already transformed music, film and TV. Continue reading...

Company says Adobe Firefly is a ‘co-pilot’ to graphic design rather than a replacement for humansSoftware giant Adobe has announced it will integrate generative AI into its widely used Photoshop program, while downplaying fears the move will lead to job losses and mass fakes.The brand most associated with image editing will incorporate the generative AI product Adobe Firefly, which launched as a beta six weeks ago, creating a tool the company says will become a “co-pilot” to graphic design rather than a replacement for humans.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Facebook has been hit with a €1.2bn fine by EU regulators, and the cracks in the fault lines of data regulations are showing. Could that be a good thing?

Picture shared on verified accounts fuels concerns over AI’s potential to generate misinformationAn AI-generated image that appeared to show an explosion next to a building in the Pentagon complex circulated on social media platforms on Monday, in the latest incident to highlight concerns over misinformation generated by AI.The image of a tall, dark gray plume of smoke quickly spread on Twitter, including through shares by verified accounts. It remains unclear where it originated. Continue reading...

Last week, Greg Gianforte, the governor, had signed into law a bill that prohibits app stores from offering the video-sharing platformTikTok has filed a federal lawsuit against Montana over the state’s new law banning the short-video app.In the suit filed on Monday, the company argues the ban violates first amendment rights of both the company and its users. Continue reading...

Penalty from Ireland’s privacy regulator is a record for breach of EU data protection regulation

Bo Young Lee faced criticism for Zoom sessions that focused on white women’s experience of ‘Karen’ stereotype of entitlementUber has suspended its head of diversity, equity and inclusion after Black and Hispanic employees complained about the workplace events she moderated exploring the experience of white American women under the title “Don’t Call Me Karen”.The ride-hailing app has confirmed that it has asked Bo Young Lee, who has led its DEI department for five years, to take a leave of absence while the company works out “next steps”. Her suspension is the latest wave of chaos to strike the $72bn company over its corporate culture. Continue reading...

Composer Brendan Angelides was cautious about agreeing to write the soundtrack for the latest edition of Ubisoft’s blockbuster. But then he met Palestinian composer and orchestrator Akram Haddad“I think, initially, Ubisoft approached me because of my electronic music background – my live career, my albums, my touring. But I didn’t know if I was the right person for the job, you know?”Composer Brendan Angelides has never worked in video game music before. You might know him better as Eskmo or Welder, or perhaps as the mind behind the music of TV shows 13 Reasons Why or Billions. When Ubisoft approached him to be the composer for its sort-of reboot of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Mirage, he had doubts. The game is set at the height of the Islamic golden age, and centres around Baghdad: a hub flowing with the lifeblood of a changing world, a cultural centre of art and science, old and new. Continue reading...

A professor of law who’s a computer geek carves an undaunted path through the conceptual and technical undergrowth in this illuminating tour of cyberspace’s dark sideAs we head towards 2030, a terrible realisation is dawning on us – that we have built a world that is critically dependent on a set of technologies that almost nobody understands, and which are also extremely fragile and insecure. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing seeks to tackle both sides of this dilemma: our collective ignorance, on the one hand, and our insecurity on the other. Its author says that he embarked on the project seeking an understanding of just three things. Why is the internet so insecure? How (and why) do the hackers who exploit its vulnerabilities do what they do? And what can be done about it?In ornithological terms, Scott Shapiro is a pretty rare bird – an eminent legal scholar who is also a geek. Wearing one hat (or perhaps a wig), he teaches jurisprudence, constitutional law, legal philosophy and related topics to Yale students. But wearing different headgear (a reversed baseball cap?), he is also the founding director of the university’s cybersecurity lab, which does pretty good research on security and information technology generally. Continue reading...

Compact Bluetooth earbuds get better sound, noise-cancelling and battery life – and a funky clear caseThe latest Beats earbuds from Apple improve the noise-cancelling and sound of their predecessors – and make them easier to use across almost all phones while adding a fresh transparent option.The Studio Buds+ cost £179.99 ($169.99) and, as the name suggests, are enhanced versions of the already good Studio Buds from 2021. Continue reading...

The Ethiopian-born computer scientist lost her job after pointing out the inequalities built into AI. But after decades working with technology companies, she knows all too much about discrimination‘It feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”Gebru is talking about her specialised field: artificial intelligence. On the day we speak via a video call, she is in Kigali, Rwanda, preparing to host a workshop and chair a panel at an international conference on AI. It will address the huge growth in AI’s capabilities, as well as something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power. Continue reading...

The controversial author on the importance of updating his landmark book on animal liberation, being ‘flexibly vegan’ and the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence for the non-human worldAustralian philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good. He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.Why write Animal Liberation Now?

The CEO of the social media giant has spent billions on his virtual reality dream – and still no one understands the idea. Now the world’s richest firm could change the gameIn Meta’s quarterly earnings call in April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was on the defensive. The metaverse, the vision of a globe-spanning virtual reality that he had literally bet his multibillion-dollar empire on creating, had been usurped as the new hot thing by the growing hype around artificial intelligence (AI).Critics had even noticed Meta itself changing its tune, highlighting the difference between a November statement from Zuckerberg, in which he described the project as a “high-priority growth area” and a March note that instead focused on how “advancing AI” was the company’s “single largest investment”. Continue reading...

Robots that can assist caregivers have been talked up as being transformative. But some researchers fear such technology could take more than it givesIngrid’s 22-year-old son Tom doesn’t understand danger. He cannot leave the house by himself because he does not know that cars may kill him and, in winter, he forgets to wear enough clothes to stay warm. He was born with Down’s syndrome and Ingrid says that “he’s calm and shy and really polite, but he needs help with everything”.Ingrid is one of millions of people caring for a loved one at home today. In the UK, “family caregivers” constitute about 9% of the population and they outstrip paid care workers by more than three to one. This is because most care continues to be carried out in people’s homes, rather than in residential facilities or by paid workers in the community. For this oft-overlooked army of supporters, it’s a difficult life. According to an annual survey of family caregivers in the UK, 45% had been providing support for 90 hours or more each week, and a similar proportion had not taken a break from caring in the past year. Caregivers consistently report lost income, higher than average rates of depression and anxiety, lack of time to rest, exercise or socialise, or to attend their own medical appointments – to do much of anything for themselves, really. Continue reading...

The OpenAI CEO says his industry needs government intervention. Whether it’s a ploy or a plea for help, we should be concernedWatching the opening day of the US Senate hearings on AI brought to mind Marx’s quip about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Except this time it’s the other way round. Some time ago we had the farce of the boss of Meta (neé Facebook) explaining to a senator that his company made money from advertising. This week we had the tragedy of seeing senators quizzing Sam Altman, the new acceptable face of the tech industry.Why tragedy? Well, as one of my kids, looking up from revising O-level classics, once explained to me: “It’s when you can see the disaster coming but you can’t do anything to stop it.” The trigger moment was when Altman declared: “We think that regulatory interventions by government will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.” Warming to the theme, he said that the US government “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities”. He believed that companies like his can “partner with governments, including ensuring that the most powerful AI models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating processes that develop and update safety measures and examining opportunities for global coordination.” Continue reading...

He emulates the Virgin founder’s freewheeling portfolio career. But he is also the tycoon behind a major UK power supplier dealing with an energy crisis. Is he spreading himself too thin?Pink flamingos once strolled around a rooftop garden set high above the traffic of Kensington High Street in west London, where stars including Madonna and George Harrison rubbed shoulders with the business elite.The exclusive party venue was owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin for 37 years before closing in 2018 after struggling to make a profit. Continue reading...

False news stories, images, video and audio could be tailored to audiences and created at scale by next springNext year’s elections in Britain and the US could be marked by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, experts have warned, as generated images, text and deepfake videos go viral at the behest of swarms of AI-powered propaganda bots.Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington this week that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users. Continue reading...

The Argentinian photographer was drawn to capture a stranger’s self-expression on a trip to New YorkSeconds before this was taken, Lucía Mara had chased the woman down New York’s Third Avenue. It was the Argentinian photographer’s last day in the city and she was running late to a meeting before her flight home to Buenos Aires.It was a sunny October day, bright after a night of rain, and the early afternoon light had illuminated the woman’s violet hair just as Mara, who studied photography and film at the University of California, passed by. She abandoned thoughts of her meeting and took off in pursuit, then, breathless, requested permission to take a photo. The woman, she says, was “ecstatic”. Continue reading...

Labour for the Long Term says UK risks falling even further into dependence on US tech firmsKeir Starmer should pledge £11bn towards building “BritGPT” and a national artificial intelligence (AI) cloud in the next Labour manifesto or risk the UK falling ever further into dependence on American tech companies, an affiliated thinktank has said.Labour for the Long Term, which campaigns within the party for it to adopt “long-termist” policies that mitigate dangers such as pandemics, climate breakdown, and AI extinction, argues in a report that the £1bn pledged by the government in the 2023 budget is not enough to protect Britain’s future independence. Continue reading...

State subsidies and industry backing pull in foreign investment as country creates ‘Battery Valley’Forty miles from the coast of Britain, where the government was again told this week that without urgent action it risks losing the electric vehicle race, “Battery Valley” is taking shape in northern France.Emmanuel Macron’s announcement last week that the Taiwanese battery maker ProLogium had chosen Dunkirk for its first foreign facility brings to four the number of gigafactories planned in a corridor stretching about 60 miles inland from the port. Continue reading...

The trailer for Gareth Edwards’ new film shows humanity being outsmarted by AI – and is released just as our overlords-to-be are rearing their terrifying headsIt’s been a while since we had a truly great movie about devious, dystopian AIs priming themselves to take over the world, in which the key choices made by mere humans will decide whether we end up as just an organic footnote in histories written by our machine conquerors. Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina (2014) springs to mind, while 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron was a fun comic book romp, if lacking the spiky gravitas and sly intellectual thrust of Garland’s debut. Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother explored similar territory in 2019 with a rather more claustrophobic, yet devastatingly incisive touch. Now there’s Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, the first trailer for which debuted this week, arriving just as very real concerns about the ability of artificial intelligence to really muck things up for us humans are rearing their terrifying digital heads.At first glance, it looks as if Edwards has thrown in all our favourite sci-fi tropes. The basic scenario – tooled up military man fails in mission to wipe out robot child because she is just too cute – reminds us of kind-hearted Din Djarin’s inability to bounty hunt Grogu in early episodes of The Mandalorian. Continue reading...

Tejay Fletcher’s site offered tools allowing criminals to make phone calls that appeared to be from trusted companiesThe mastermind behind an online fraud shop used to con victims out of more than £100m has been jailed for more than 13 years.Tejay Fletcher, 35, bought a £230,000 Lamborghini, two Range Rovers worth £110,000 and an £11,000 Rolex after making about £2m from the iSpoof.cc website. He was the founder and leading administrator of the site, which was brought down last year in the UK’s biggest fraud sting. Continue reading...

Free app designed to shed light on ‘mental load’ overwhelmingly carried by women when it comes to choresThe Spanish government is hoping to encourage men to do more at home by developing a free app that will log how much time each household or family member spends on domestic chores.Announcing the measure in Geneva earlier this week, Spain’s secretary of state for equality, Ángela Rodríguez, said the aim was to shed light on the invisible “mental load” overwhelmingly carried by women when it comes to domestic tasks. Continue reading...

Young users question whether law tied to national security concerns will take effect in January as plannedOn Wednesday, a 30-year-old influencer named Kylie Nelson signed a deal with TikTok to promote the app on her page. A few hours later, she learned that the state of Montana had passed a law banning TikTok.“Now I’m wondering: what do we do here?” said Nelson, who lives in Billings and is a full-time content creator. “About 60% to 70% of my brand collaborations are with TikTok. So, yeah, I’m pretty bummed out by the news.” Continue reading...

Ignoring ChatGPT and its cousins won’t get us anywhere. In fact, these systems reveal issues we too often missIn my spring lecture course of 120 students, my teaching assistants caught four examples of students using artificial-intelligence-driven language programs like ChatGPT to complete short essays. In each case, the students confessed to using such systems and agreed to rewrite the assignments themselves.With all the panic about how students might use these systems to get around the burden of actually learning, we often forget that as of 2023, the systems don’t work well at all. It was easy to spot these fraudulent essays. They contained spectacular errors. They used text that did not respond to the prompt we had issued to students. Or they just sounded unlike what a human would write. Continue reading...

Justices avoid weighing in on law which shields internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their usersThe US supreme court issued two decisions on Thursday that reinforced existing protections for internet platforms against being held liable for content, marking a victory for tech behemoths including Twitter and Google.The cases had been closely watched for their impact on a federal law known as section 230, which protects internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their users, a law that – if successfully challenged – could have upended the rules of the internet. Continue reading...

The state governor had on Wednesday signed into law the first US state-level ban on the appA group of TikTok creators have sued to block Montana’s ban of the platform, arguing that the new law violates their first amendment rights.Greg Gianforte, Montana’s governor, on Wednesday signed into law the first US state-level ban of the increasingly embattled social media app, effective 1 January 2024. The governor argued the move was “to protect Montanans’ personal and private data from being harvested by the Chinese Communist party”. Continue reading...

All you need to know about the US state becoming the first to prohibit the social video app for consumer usersTikTok has been banned in Montana. The first US state-level ban of the increasingly embattled social video app is already proving controversial, although it will not take effect until 2024. Continue reading...

While the US and EU announce bigger programmes, one British startup says the government’s investment figure is less than the cost of one basic plantThe UK government has announced an investment of up to £1bn in the domestic semiconductor industry, but has been criticised for declining to join the spending race that has seen the US and EU announce significantly bigger programmes.Labour accused the government of lacking ambition in its announcement, while one UK startup said the £1bn figure was less than the cost of one basic semiconductor plant. Continue reading...

Possible interventions include default smaller portions and prominently displaying low-calorie foodsFood delivery apps could help tackle the obesity crisis by making lower-calorie options more prominent on their sites, research suggests.A study, presented at the European Congress of Obesity in Dublin, involved creating a simulated food delivery app and conducting three randomised controlled trials involving 23,783 adult participants. Continue reading...

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In this week’s newsletter: The Zelda sequel’s all-encompassing approval says something about how important games have become in our cultural lives

In his new memoir, Before We Go Live, the Twitch and YouTube star pulls back the curtain on the world of pro game streaming – and details some of the toxic behaviour he says he has witnessedStephen Flavall – or Jorbs as he is known on YouTube and Twitch, where he has more than 100,000 followers – rose to fame streaming strategy games such as XCOM and Slay the Spire, a game in which he has achieved several world records. He’s considered a high-ranking Twitch streamer, with a soothing monotone voice and an infectious laugh. He’s very consistent. When you watch Flavall’s Twitch channel, you know exactly what to expect: funny and cerebral anecdotes, informative strategy tips and a supportive community.But his new memoir, Before We Go Live, does something unexpected: it pulls back the curtain on the back end of professional game streaming – which, as anyone who follows online gaming culture knows, is rife with rampant toxicity, abuse and harassment. It’s a chilling wakeup call for the industry, from the top down. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Why did Amanda Riley con the blogosphere into paying for her fake illness? Find out in Scamanda. Plus: five of the best podcasts to mend a broken heart