Technology | The Guardian

Paulina Porizkova, one of the great supermodels of the 80s, has refound fame – as ‘the lady who cries on Instagram’. It began with the death of and betrayal by her husband of 30 yearsMoving through a room as a teenage supermodel when she first came to New York, mouths would drop, drinks would appear, eyes would spring out of sockets as if from a cartoon cat. In one chatshow appearance I watched on YouTube, from 1994, the radio personality Howard Stern spontaneously undressed in front of her. Trousers, shirt, everything.But at 57, the experience is quite different for Paulina Porizkova. One night earlier this year, she was at a party in Manhattan. Pushing her way through the crowd, she felt out of place, and invisible, and old. Then a young woman sitting at the bar grabbed her arm. “Aren’t you…?” the woman yelled over the music. “Yes,” said Porizkova quickly. Continue reading...

The tech giant’s flawed business model for its popular smart devices has cost the company a fortune and thousands of jobsIntrigued by an Ars Technica post about Amazon’s Alexa that suggested all was not well in the tech company’s division that looks after its smart home devices, I went rooting in a drawer where the Echo Dot I bought years ago had been gathering dust. Having found it, and set it up to join the upgraded wifi network that hadn’t existed when I first got it, I asked it a question: “Alexa, why are you such a loss-maker?” To which she calmly replied: “This might answer your question: mustard gas, also known as Lost, is manufactured by the United States.” At which point, I solemnly thanked her, pulled the power cable and returned her to the drawer, where she will continue to gather dust until I can think of an ecologically responsible way of recycling her.I bought the device on 5 December 2016 (on the basis that one shouldn’t pontificate on kit that one hasn’t purchased oneself) and wrote about it in January 2017. Rereading that column now reveals that I thought the device’s arrival represented a significant moment in the evolution of surveillance capitalism. Why? Because its target market was the home, which was, as the veteran tech analyst Ben Thompson observed at the time, “the one place in the entire world where smartphones were not necessarily the most convenient device, or touch the easiest input method: more often than not your smartphone is charging and talking to a device doesn’t carry the social baggage it might elsewhere”. Continue reading...

The Italian photographer was in San Francisco’s Chinatown when she came across this grand ivory buildingArianna Genghini’s first stop on her family road trip through four US states was San Francisco. While they went on to travel through Utah, Nevada and Arizona in a rented minivan, it was the California city’s expansive Chinatown that captured the Italian photographer’s eye most powerfully.“I was exploring with my sister Sofia, and we spotted the Dragon Gate at the entrance to the district. It’s one of the largest Chinese communities outside China, just like a little city inside a bigger one. Stepping inside, I fell in love,” she says. Continue reading...

Simplified home screens and customisable interfaces aid those who struggle with touchscreensThese days many daily tasks require a smartphone because of new online payment security checks and the widespread use of parking apps. This is a potential nightmare for those who struggle with touchscreens, apps and texting but there are some easier-to-use models to help conquer the technology divide.Manufacturers continually modify their smartphones to make them more straightforward to use but, unfortunately, when it comes to apps, whether it is your bank or WhatsApp, you will still be at the mercy of their interface as this cannot be changed. So while there is no truly simple smartphone that can do every task, here are some of the best options. Continue reading...

From banking to shopping and parking, consumers without access to tech are left frustratedMany people in Britain can’t live without their smartphone and use it to manage all aspects of their lives, from banking to shopping and socialising. But what if the opposite is true, and this clever technology is erecting invisible barriers that leave you unable to do basic things such as pay online, contact your GP or even park.This is what it feels like for Jean Peters*. The 83-year-old widow, who lives alone in a south Cambridgeshire village, complains that “everything is going online at a faster and faster rate” to the detriment of those “who can’t keep up”. Continue reading...

Billionaire says he prefers ‘someone sensible and centrist’ but that he had been disappointed by the Democrats so farElon Musk has said he would support Donald Trump’s arch rival, Ron DeSantis, in 2024 if the Florida governor were to run for president.“Yes”, Musk said in a tweet when asked if he would support DeSantis in 2024, after suggesting he had not found his ideal candidate among Democrats. Continue reading...

New colour-coded categories next week for individuals, government and firms with accounts ‘manually authenticated’Elon Musk has said Twitter verification will return next week with colour-coded categories for individuals, government accounts and companies.Twitter’s new owner said the platform would launch a new verification service on Friday next week, having pulled an earlier attempt at a revamp that gave blue ticks to accounts paying $7.99 (£6.60) a month after it triggered a flood of impostor accounts. Continue reading...

It started as a trick played on a young IT engineer, and has inspired art installations and even social experiments. Its creators – and those they influenced – hail the bleeping genius of a coin-op classicPong: a game so simple a bundle of lab-grown brain cells could play it. This might sound like a low blow, but it’s true – last month, Australia-based startup Cortical Labs challenged its creation DishBrain, a biological computer chip that uses a combination of living neurons and silicon, to play the early console classic.The game – a 2D version of table tennis where players control a rectangle “paddle”, moving it up and down to rally a ball – ran in the background, wired up to the DishBrain. Electrical stimulations were fed into the cells to represent the placement of the paddle and feedback was pinged when the ball was hit or missed. The scientists then measured the DishBrain’s response, observing that it expended more or less energy depending on the position of the ball.

On one of firm’s biggest shopping days of year, employees demand better wages and conditionsAmazon warehouse workers in the UK and 40 other countries are to strike and stage protests timed to coincide with the Black Friday sales, one of the company’s biggest shopping days of the year.Employees in dozens of countries, from Japan and Australia to India, the US and across Europe, are demanding better wages and conditions in a campaign called “Make Amazon Pay”. Continue reading...

The ‘dabloon revolution’ is all over the social media platform. Here’s everything you need to knowA “dabloon revolution” is taking over TikTok – but what is it and how did we get here? Continue reading...

Facebook owner seeks assurance that vital directive will not be purged by former business secretary’s billFacebook and Instagram have asked for government protection from Jacob Rees-Mogg’s bonfire of up to 4,000 EU laws on post-Brexit statute books.In a letter to a parliamentary committee to be published on Friday, the parent group, Meta, asks that laws underpinning social media firms are either “explicitly maintained elsewhere” or “removed from the scope” of the retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill. Continue reading...

Nonconsensual explicit images to be tackled in bill returning to parliament next monthNonconsensual “deepfake” pornography and “downblousing” will be made illegal when the online safety bill returns to parliament in December, the government has announced.Explicit images taken without someone’s consent, through hidden cameras or surreptitious photography, will be criminalised, including so-called downblousing pictures. A previous law banning “upskirt” voyeurism left a loophole that failed to tackle images that weren’t taken with the intent of photographing the victim’s genitals or buttocks. Continue reading...

Platform could struggle to enforce new EU laws covering power of big tech companies and hate speechTwitter has disbanded its entire Brussels office, according to media reports, raising questions about the social media company’s compliance with new EU laws to control big tech.Julia Mozer and Dario La Nasa, who were in charge of Twitter’s digital policy in Europe, left the company last week, the Financial Times reported. Continue reading...

Never mind the yuck factor: precision fermentation could produce new staple foods, and end our reliance on farmingSo what do we do now? After 27 summits and no effective action, it seems that the real purpose was to keep us talking. If governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, there would have been no Cops 2-27. The major issues would have been resolved at Cop1, as the ozone depletion crisis was at a single summit in Montreal.Nothing can now be achieved without mass protest, whose aim, like that of protest movements before us, is to reach the critical mass that triggers a social tipping point. But, as every protester knows, this is only part of the challenge. We also need to translate our demands into action, which requires political, economic, cultural and technological change. All are necessary, none are sufficient. Only together can they amount to the change we need to see. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The comedian retells cringey stories from his past – and cajoles the same out of his celebrity guests – in Safe Space. Plus: five of the best quiz podcasts

Officers kick and hit staff at Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, with Apple warning of iPhone 14 delivery delaysPolice in China have dealt out beatings to workers protesting over working conditions and pay at the biggest factory for iPhones, as the country’s Covid-19 cases hit a new daily high.Videos online showed thousands of people in masks facing rows of police in white protective suits with plastic riot shields. Police kicked and hit a protester with clubs after he grabbed a metal pole that had been used to strike him. People who made the footage said it was filmed at the site. Continue reading...

Ordinary buyers should beware. They are being sucked into perilously risky trading that only professionals understandFollowing the bankruptcy of one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, the price of bitcoin (BTC) has tumbled again. It is now about $16,500 – a far cry from the all-time high of $66,000 just a year ago.Why such a large drop in value? It’s because of the highly toxic combination of an exchange (an electronic platform for buying and selling) called Binance, a stablecoin (a crypto whose price is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar or another “fiat” currency) called tether, and the skilled professional traders running high-frequency algorithms. Continue reading...

Technology to de-age actors on screen has been in use for years – with varied success. But producers of the new Indiana Jones film are promising a breakthroughName: Digital de-ageing.Age: About 18. The first high-profile example was showcased in X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006. Continue reading...

Sam Bankman-Fried continues to say firm’s downfall can be solely explained by misplaced $8bnThe founder of the failed crypto exchange FTX has written to its former employees apologising for his role in its collapse and continuing to insist its downfall can be solely explained by a misplaced $8bn (£6.7bn).In the letter, first published by the industry news site CoinDesk, Sam Bankman-Fried wrote: “I deeply regret my oversight failure. In retrospect, I wish that we had done many many things differently … I’m going to do what I can to make it up to you guys – and to the customers – even if that takes the rest of my life.” Continue reading...

You can keep your iPhones, emails and streaming videos. Aren from London, Lisa from St Louis and Billy from Wigan are quite happy with old-fashioned alternatives. And there are plenty more where they came fromMore than 40 years since the fax machine became an office mainstay, it seems the party is finally over. With telecom providers no longer required to offer fax services, these machines may soon be consigned to the dusty attic of bygone tech. But for the TikTok generation, who’ve never known life without wifi, concepts such as fax, dial-up internet and Friday night trips to Blockbuster Video aren’t just outdated, they’re completely alien. Even so, not everyone has forgotten about the charms of older technology. From the clattering keys of an old typewriter to the nostalgic joy of a chunky Walkman, some people have never left their favourite tech behind. Continue reading...

Figure raised exceeds what most of the digital businesses have been paying in UK corporation taxThe digital services tax has reaped almost £360m from US tech giants including Amazon, Google and Apple in its first year, raising more from most of the digital businesses than they have been paying in UK corporation tax.A National Audit Office (NAO) report has found the UK’s digital services tax, which was introduced in April 2020 and imposes a 2% charge on the gross revenues made by digital titans running search engines, social media services and online marketplaces, hauled in 30% more than the government had forecast in 2021. Continue reading...

Hearing in Delaware bankruptcy court is the first since the cryptocurrency exchange declared bankruptcy earlier this monthBankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX was run as the “personal fiefdom” of founder Sam Bankman-Fried, with one of the company’s units spending $300m on real estate in the Bahamas for the use of its executives, a court heard on Tuesday.The hearing in Delaware’s bankruptcy court is the first since FTX declared insolvency earlier this month. Continue reading...

The driver has not yet been charged with a crime, and the tech company said it was ‘devastated by the shocking events’An SUV crashed through the front window of an Apple store Monday in Massachusetts, killing one person and injuring 16 others, authorities said.Police were investigating but didn’t immediately say whether the crash was believed to be accidental. Hingham police chief David Jones said only that it was an active investigation. The driver of a 2019 Toyota 4Runner was being interviewed. Continue reading...

Twitter boss says he has ‘no mercy’ for those who capitalise on deaths of children, citing loss of son in 2002Elon Musk has said he will not reinstate the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Twitter, saying he has “no mercy” for people who capitalize on the deaths of children for personal fame.Twitter permanently suspended the accounts of Jones and his Infowars website in September 2018 for violating the platform’s abusive behavior policy. Continue reading...

Cambridge-based company blames global uncertainty but says IPO preparations are ‘advanced’Much-anticipated plans to list the British chip designer Arm on the stock exchange have been delayed by managers who fear the global economic downturn and a slump in tech shares could spook potential investors.The Cambridge-based company wrote to private shareholders a few days ago, saying the initial public offering (IPO), which could value the company at up to $40bn (£34bn), would not take place until well into next year. The company was widely expected to float as soon as the first quarter of next year. Continue reading...

‘The people have spoken,’ says site’s owner, having acknowledged during online poll that automated bots were voting tooElon Musk has reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account after users on the social media platform voted by a slim majority to lift a ban on the former US president.Trump’s account was suspended in 2021 after the January 6 Capitol riot, for violating Twitter guidelines and because of the risk of “further incitement of violence”. Continue reading...

Sam Bankman-Fried said his billions would save the world – but his philanthropic ideas ranged from the worthy to the severely outlandishMost of us don’t think of power-hungry killer robots as an imminent threat to humanity, especially when poverty and the climate crisis are already ravaging the Earth.This wasn’t the case for Sam Bankman-Fried and his followers, powerful actors who have embraced a school of thought within the effective altruism movement called “longtermism”. Continue reading...

Reported posts aimed at 43 players remain live, according to anti-hate speech campaigners, fuelling concerns over possible abuse during World CupTweets hurling racist abuse at footballers, including the N-word, monkey emojis and calls for them to be deported, are not being removed by Twitter.New research shows the platform failed to act on 99 out of 100 racist tweets reported to it in the week before the World Cup. Continue reading...

Silicon Valley ‘saviours’ are the heroes of the hour. Too often they have feet of clayTrussonomics trashed within eight weeks. Donald Trump’s anointed candidates cut down in the US midterms. Sam Bankman-Fried, the poster boy of the crypto world, collapsing into bankruptcy. Elon Musk throwing Twitter into turmoil. The bursting of myths and the shredding of reputations seem to be the themes of the day.Each of these cases is, of course, distinct and the root causes of each disaster different. There is a danger, too, in discussing these developments, of seeming to revel in failure. Too much of the debate about Musk and Twitter, especially, has mixed despair with schadenfreude. Yet, viewed collectively, these cases also tell us something deeper about our age and in particular about the ways in which we think about innovation and change. Continue reading...

Furor over platform’s verified profiles may have done some good, but challenges still plague the site after a mass worker exodusAgainst warnings that Twitter is on the verge of collapse, the social media platform hadn’t died Saturday – at least not yet. But things aren’t necessarily going well for new owner Elon Musk’s goal to re-engineer the company to his tastes and with it the larger, potentially quixotic, goal of re-setting standards of social discourse online.But while reports of chaos at the company multiply, not all interactions have necessarily proved negative. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly said last week that a tweet by an imposter account over insulin pricing in the US that caused the company’s stock to plunge “probably highlights” a need to bring down the cost of the drug. Continue reading...

AI is becoming more sophisticated, and some say capable of writing academic essays. But at what point does the intrusion of AI constitute cheating?

Something’s wrong when basic infrastructure maintenance seems utopian, while the hare-brained schemes of tech oligarchs become routine

The tech company is struggling to retain workers after Musk demanded employees sign a pledge to work ‘long hours at high intensity’The crisis at Twitter reached new heights after hundreds of employees were reported to have rejected Elon Musk’s ultimatum to keep working for the business, threatening its ability to keep operating.As the company temporarily closed its offices to staff on Friday, Twitter users began saying their goodbyes and linking to accounts on other platforms. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Game Freak/Nintendo

Our nation’s data security practices have been so sloppy that recent major data breaches could have been avoided with simple protectionsFew would disagree with the view that the world has changed more in the last 20 years than it did in the 2,000 years before that.In today’s connected world, breaking news is streamed live into the palm of our hands in seconds. The dark side to that connectivity is that the minute details of our personal lives are increasingly collected and stored by governments and corporations. Continue reading...

BEIS has ‘national security’ concerns over China-owned Nexperia which took control of Newport Wafer FabThe British government has blocked the takeover of the UK’s largest producer of semiconductors by a Chinese-owned manufacturer, citing “a risk to national security”.The business department’s decision on Wednesday comes more than a year after semiconductor company Nexperia first announced that it had taken control of Newport Wafer Fab in south Wales in July 2021, in a £63m deal. Continue reading...

Remaining staff given until Thursday to confirm they will work ‘long hours at high intensity’ as part of ‘the new Twitter’Elon Musk has given Twitter’s remaining staff a Thursday deadline to commit to working “long hours at high intensity” and being “extremely hardcore” or else leave with three months’ severance pay.In an email to the social media platform’s employees, seen by the Guardian, its new owner said building the next iteration of Twitter would require “exceptional performance”. Continue reading...

Wakey Wines goes viral after selling Logan Paul and KSI’s ‘hydration drink’, with people travelling miles to visit shopDarren Grieves has travelled 130 miles (209km) from Carlisle with his three children to spend £66 on four drinks from an off-licence in Wakefield.The wagon driver has brought Darcy, 12, and nine-year-olds Lacy and Ryan to a fairly nondescript shop in the West Yorkshire city centre that has become an unlikely TikTok sensation. Continue reading...

The Tesla CEO was in a Delaware court to defend a 2018 $56bn pay package that helped him become world’s richest manElon Musk told a court on Wednesday that he expects to reduce his time at Twitter and eventually find someone else to run the social media company.“There’s an initial burst of activity needed post-acquisition to reorganize the company,” Musk said in his testimony. “But then I expect to reduce my time at Twitter.” Continue reading...

Crypto exchange promoters such as Larry David, Naomi Osaka, Gisele Bündchen and Shaquille O’Neal also named as defendantsA class action lawsuit has been launched against FTX’s former chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried over the crypto exchange’s collapse which also names as defendants a host of its celebrity backers including Larry David, Naomi Osaka, Gisele Bündchen and Shaquille O’Neal.Filed in Florida by class action attorney Adam Moskowitz, the case is one of the first to attempt to hold the sports stars and entertainers who promoted cryptocurrencies in the boom years responsible for their support. Continue reading...

Caleb Simpson’s man-on-the-street TikTok videos capture the insides of stranger’s homes for millions of followersCome inside a shoebox studio apartment with a stripper pole in downtown Manhattan that rents for $2,095 (£1,764) a month. Or an $800 (£674) housing project unit with hand-painted kitchen walls. What about a luxury $5,000-a-month rental with marble countertops? Curious voyeurs can see them all on Caleb Simpson’s TikTok, and they won’t be alone. Nearly 6 million people follow his short-form house tours, romps that he bills as “this generation’s MTV Cribs”.“Seeing the inside of someone’s home is one of the most intimate things you can ever do,” Simpson, 30, tells the Guardian. “And then there are the price points, what you pay for your space – people will be curious about that.” Continue reading...

‘Well-worn’ German sandals owned by Apple co-founder set record at auctionSteve Jobs left an indelible footprint on the technology industry. Now, a different kind of legacy – in the form of a “well-used” pair of Birkenstocks that still retain his feet’s imprints – has fetched a record-breaking price at auction.A suede pair of the beloved German sandals, worn by Steve Jobs in the 1970s and 1980s, sold this week for nearly $220,000, the highest price ever paid for a pair of sandals, according to an auction house. Continue reading...

The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange will cost investors billions. But why would anyone give money to a man who plays video games in important meetings?

TikTok’s book reviewing community is here to stay, having even received publishing awards for innovation, but issues of authenticity and safety aboundBookTok, the nickname for TikTok videos in which books are discussed, analysed, cried about and turned into “aesthetic” moodboards, began as a small group of the app’s users who wanted a place to talk about books. It has since grown into a hugely influential community that has the power to pluck authors out of relative obscurity and propel them into the bestsellers charts.Earlier this month it was named FutureBook Person of the Year, an accolade which recognises digital innovation and excellence across the book trade. According to James Stafford, Head of Partnerships and Community at TikTok, BookTok is a community of “creative people around the world with a shared passion for literature”. Publishers, creators and writers have generally agreed that this corner of the platform has had an overwhelmingly positive effect, having led to huge increases in book sales and the discovery of new writers. The Bookseller even recently called it “the last safe place on the internet”. Continue reading...

Users on gamer-focused platform manage to respond to posts despite government blocking all commentsThe UK Treasury has opened an account on Discord to a torrent of abuse from users of the gamer-focused chat app – abuse they managed to send despite the government blocking all comments on the service.As Twitter’s future looks increasingly uncertain, prominent users are preparing alternatives, directing followers to Facebook and Instagram accounts, handing out their Mastodon addresses, and setting up servers on chat apps such as Discord. Continue reading...

Sam Bankman-Fried was what everyone wanted a crypto billionaire to be – until things began to go very, very wrong

Bankman-Fried promoted himself as an eccentric genius. In reality, his image was a distraction from what was going on inside FTXLast Tuesday, FTX, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, closed withdrawals, blaming “severe liquidity problems”. By Friday, FTX had filed for bankruptcy.After a stupendously profitable asset bubble in 2021, the cryptocurrency industry suffered harsh reversals in 2022. A string of high-profile collapses – Terra-Luna, Three Arrows Capital, Celsius Network, Voyager Digital – lost investors a fortune, tanked prices and demolished market confidence. But FTX’s sudden collapse caught almost everyone by surprise.David Gerard is the author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain (2017) and Libra Shrugged (2020). He writes the cryptocurrency and blockchain news site Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain Continue reading...

President Nayib Bukele bet on bitcoin and its tumbling value has put the Central American country in a financially precarious spotAs crypto-Twitter cascaded with apocalyptic memes about the bankruptcy of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the sharp drop in the bitcoin price, one account has remained notably silent on the topic.Unlike in previous crashes, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who made bitcoin legal tender a year ago, did not exhort his followers to “buy the dip”. The laser eyes, popular among crypto currency traders, have long since been removed from his Twitter profile. Continue reading...

Case is a historic win for consumers after an investigation found the tech company tracked users’ location even after they opted outGoogle has agreed to a $391.5m settlement with 40 states to resolve an investigation into how the company tracked users’ locations, state attorneys general announced on Monday.The states’ investigation was sparked by a 2018 Associated Press story, which found that Google continued to track people’s location data even after they opted out of such tracking by disabling a feature the company called “location history”. Continue reading...

Entrepreneur at center of FTX scandal put luxury residence up for sale the same day crypto exchange filed for bankruptcySam Bankman-Fried, the crypto trader entrepreneur at the center of the FTX scandal, reportedly put his luxury $40m Bahamas penthouse up for sale on Friday – the same day the cryptocurrency exchange filed for bankruptcy.Bankman-Fried’s penthouse – “the Orchid”, located in Albany, an exclusive private community in Nassau – was listed by real estate agent Seaside Bahamas at $39,500,000. The offering was first reported on Twitter by Autism Capital. Continue reading...