Technology | The Guardian

Ontario was once at the center of the dairy industry. Now it’s home to Amazon’s largest warehouse and hundreds of others – with dangerous consequencesEdgar Jaime didn’t realize that the largest Amazon warehouse in the world was being constructed across the street from his vegetable farm in Ontario, California, until the walls went up.Then again, Jaime can’t say he was too surprised. Continue reading...

At a stage appearance Sunday with comedian Dave Chappelle, the audience made their disapproval of the new Twitter owner knownThe polite version is that it didn’t go quite according to plan when Elon Musk made his most recent stage appearance.“Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” the comedian Dave Chappelle roared on stage at the Chase Center in San Francisco as he invited the Twitter owner out to join him on Sunday night. Continue reading...

It has been hailed as the AI program that could spell the end of search engines, but we should beware putting our trust in a machineAs the capabilities of natural language processing technology continue to advance, there is a growing hype around the potential of chatbots and conversational AI systems. One such system, ChatGPT, claims to be able to engage in natural, human-like conversation and even provide useful information and advice. However, there are valid concerns about the limitations of ChatGPT and other conversational AI systems, and their ability to truly replicate human intelligence and interaction.No, I didn’t write that. It was actually written by ChatGPT itself, a conversational AI software program, after I asked it to create “an opening paragraph to an article sceptical about the abilities of ChatGPT in the style of Kenan Malik”. I might quibble about the stolid prose but it’s an impressive attempt. And it is not difficult to see why there has been such excitement, indeed hype, about the latest version of the chatbot since it was released a week ago. Continue reading...

Scientists are hoping ‘historical biomolecules’ on a 15th-century missive written by Vlad Dracula, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s vampire count, will reveal more about himOn a dark and stormy night in May this year, exactly 125 years to the day that Bram Stoker published the definitive vampire novel, two people pored over a document more than 500 years old in a room in Transylvania – signed by Dracula himself.Gleb and Svetlana Zilberstein’s mission? To extract genetic material from the letters written by Vlad Dracula – the historical inspiration for Stoker’s vampiric count – left there by his sweat, fingerprints and saliva. Continue reading...

Experts question economic case and point to environmental costs such as packaging, risks to birds and the noise factor

The Scottish photographer was looking for puffins when he spotted ‘a strange ritual by the sea’

Founder and former CEO says he could talk about what he thinks led to crash and ‘my own failings’Sam Bankman-Fried is set to testify before Congress next week about the collapse of FTX, as regulators investigate the cryptocurrency exchange he led until its recent demise.The US House committee on financial services said in a statement on Friday that the panel would hear from FTX’s newly appointed CEO, John Ray, and from Bankman-Fried on 13 December. Continue reading...

The hugely popular Lensa AI app creates portraits based on image prompts, but users say it sexualizes them unnecessarilyOfficially, the Lensa AI app creates “magic avatars” that turn a user’s selfies into lushly stylized works of art. It’s been touted by celebrities such as Chance the Rapper, Tommy Dorfman, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Britney Spears’ husband, Sam Asghari. But for many women the app does more than just spit out a pretty picture: the final results are highly sexualized, padding women’s breasts and turning their bodies into hourglass physiques.“Is it just me or are these AI selfie generator apps perpetuating misogyny?” tweeted Brandee Barker, a feminist and advocate who has worked in the tech industry. “Here are a few I got just based off of photos of my face.” One of Barker’s results showed her wearing supermodel-length hair extensions and a low-cut catsuit. Another featured her in a white bra with cleavage spilling out from the top. Continue reading...

The proposed class-action lawsuit alleges that after the takeover, 57% of women were laid off compared with 47% of menTwo women who lost their jobs at Twitter during mass layoffs after Elon Musk took over the company are suing, claiming that the company disproportionately targeted female employees for cuts.The discrimination lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges to hit the company after Musk, the world’s richest person, bought the company for $44bn and set about making swift, drastic changes including laying off around half its workforce, or roughly 3,700 employees. Hundreds more subsequently resigned. Continue reading...

Encryption of iCloud storage means the information will be safeguarded from hackers as well as government agenciesApple announced a suite of security and privacy improvements on Wednesday that the company is pitching as a way to help people protect their data from hackers, including one that civil liberty and privacy advocates have long pushed for.The tech giant will soon allow users to choose to secure more of the data backed up to their iCloud using end-to-end encryption, which means no one but the user will be able to access that information. Continue reading...

San Francisco investigating Twitter after complaint says it converted rooms in its HQ into sleeping quartersTwitter is under investigation by city officials in San Francisco following a complaint that the company allegedly converted rooms in its headquarters to sleeping quarters, an inquiry that has drawn scorn from Elon Musk.As of Monday, the office has “modest bedrooms featuring unmade mattresses, drab curtains and giant conference-room telepresence monitors” with four to eight beds a floor, employees told Forbes. The changes appear to be part of Musk’s plan for “hardcore Twitter” in which he’s demanded workers dedicate “long hours at high intensity” after he fired nearly half the company’s workforce. Continue reading...

South Dakota, Maryland and Wisconsin have also issued similar directives citing security concernsGovernor Greg Abbott of Texas on Wednesday ordered state agencies to ban TikTok on government-issued devices, citing security concerns of the app’s data-sharing practices with the Chinese government.“TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices – including when, where and how they conduct Internet activity – and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government,” according to one of the letters the governor sent to state agency leaders. Continue reading...

Online service will offer tools and sell screens, batteries and camera parts for some models released since 2020Those brave enough to attempt to fix their own iPhone or Mac with Apple’s tools can now do so in the UK and parts of Europe.The tech company is expanding its self-repair programme to Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK, allowing the public to buy genuine parts and repair kits for certain iPhones and Macs launched from 2020 onwards. Continue reading...

I pulled out before giving any bank or card numbers, but how can I protect myself now?Today I was subjected to an attempted fraud. The fraudsters made contact using Facebook Messenger and the identity of one of my friends, a former colleague.They persuaded me to believe that I had been a winner in a Facebook lottery. I pulled out before giving any bank or card details, but did reveal more information than I would have liked – my name, home address, date of birth, email, mobile and occupation.

Cryptocurrency exchange founder pledges to testify ‘once I have finished learning and reviewing what happened’The disgraced billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has said he wants to testify before Congress about what caused the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange he founded – but first he wants to fully understand the chain of events and isn’t sure how long that might take.Bankman-Fried’s pledge, made Sunday on Twitter, came after the US House financial services committee scheduled a 13 December hearing about the failure of FTX and invited him to participate. Continue reading...

Relatives of Molly Russell and other children support changes proposed as part of online safety billBereaved families are calling for easier access to the social media histories of deceased children, supporting amendments to the online safety bill.The changes have been proposed by Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer, as the bill returns to parliament on Monday. It is being supported by the family of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old who took her own life in 2017 after months of viewing harmful online content related to suicide, depression, self-harm and anxiety.In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org. Continue reading...

Watchdog must stop misleading ads locking consumers into deals up to £240 more than thought, says opposition partyLabour has called on the advertising watchdog to fast-track new rules to protect consumers from misleading marketing that could encourage them sign up to mobile and broadband deals this Christmas that will cost them hundreds of pounds more than they expected.The call follows the closure of a consultation by the Committees of Advertising Practice (Cap) – which writes the codes that all UK advertisers have to follow when running ads in any media – investigating whether telecoms companies are clearly telling consumers about looming price rises in their campaigns. Continue reading...

The French president had flagged concerns over the platform’s content moderation just a day beforeEmmanuel Macron said he had a “clear and honest” discussion with Elon Musk about Twitter’s content moderation policies, just a day after the French president had flagged his concerns on the issue.“Transparent user policies, significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech: efforts have to be made by Twitter to comply with European regulations,” Macron said in a tweet after his meeting with Musk on Friday afternoon. Continue reading...

Artificial intelligence is creating increasingly sophisticated images. But what does it mean for the art world? Gilbert and George, Gillian Wearing, Mat Collishaw, Elizabeth Price, Polly Morgan and Lindsey Mendick found outFor more than 30,000 years we have been the only art-making species on Earth, give or take the odd paint-throwing Neanderthal or chimpanzee. Art is the oldest and most spectacular triumph of human consciousness, from Lascaux to the Sistine Chapel. But a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) art software may be about to end that. It will whip you up a Picasso or a Turner in an instant, or apply their styles to any theme you picture, from Liz Truss dancing in a supermarket to a brawl in a 1970s disco.Stable Diffusion and competitors such as DALL-E 2 go far beyond previous claims for AI art. Easily accessible online, and in that sense open to full public scrutiny, they create precise, rich, convincing images in response to a typed-in text – for example “a sad cat in a mountainous landscape in the style of Turner”, or whatever combination of styles, keywords and subjects takes your fancy. Or you can ask more sidelong and existential questions, such as my request for “a photograph of a human”, which produced a bare-chested man who could be a museum exhibit of early homo sapiens – except for his mysterious earphone-like cables. For the expert there are others: “I’ve been experimenting in Wombo Dream, Midjourney and Google Colab/Disco Diffusion,” says the artist Mat Collishaw. Continue reading...

Elon Musk has been warned he has ‘huge work ahead’ to comply with the EU’s Digital Services ActThe EU has raised the prospect of a substantial fine or ban for Twitter after warning that it must “significantly increase” efforts to comply with new online legislation.Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, was told he had “huge work ahead” to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires tech firms to tackle problems including abusive posts and disinformation. Continue reading...

The crypto entrepreneur was thought to be a big donor to Democrats but now acknowledges he gave equally to GOPThe fall of crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has been painted as a big blow to the Democratic party, whose candidates were major beneficiaries of his largesse. But in a new interview, Bankman-Fried has claimed he gave equally large amounts of money to Republicans.“I donated to both parties. I donated about the same amount to both parties,” Bankman-Fried told the crypto commentator and citizen journalist Tiffany Fong. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox; Firaxis/2K

The players not the plot do most of the work in Elden Ring and other innovative titles – it could be the future of video games

Guardian writers look back at the platform’s triumphs and pitfalls as the service faces an uncertain futureWith Twitter in turmoil under its new owner, Elon Musk, many users are taking a moment to assess the legacy of the social media platform. Launched in 2006, the service has become an integral part of journalism, revolutionizing the spread of information, expanding access to sources, and elevating voices that previously went unheard. It has also, of course, become known for toxic discourse, misinformation and online abuse.As questions mount over Twitter’s future, four Guardian writers reflect on their experiences – personal and professional – with the platform. Continue reading...

Unannounced change in rules was made last week as health experts stress importance of combating disinformationTwitter will no longer enforce its policy against Covid-19 misinformation, raising concerns among public health experts that the change could have serious consequences if it discourages vaccination and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus.Eagle-eyed users spotted the change on Monday night, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter’s online rules: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” Continue reading...

An exciting multiplayer Discord game asks you to find things in the multiverse through an AI image generator. The hallucinatory results could mark a new frontier for AI art

Exclusive: a study shows the company has a long way to go in upholding its pledge to protect usersIn the wake of the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, Google pledged fresh policies to protect people’s abortion-related data. But new research has shown the way our location and other personal data is stored remains largely unchanged, raising fears that intimate details of a person’s abortion search could be used to penalize them.Google responds to tens of thousands of requests each year from law enforcement agencies seeking access to the vast troves of data collected on its users. In one six-month period in 2021, the most recent data publicly available, Google received nearly 47,000 law enforcement requests, affecting more than 100,000 accounts, and responded with some amount of data to 80% of them. The Dobbs decision sparked concerns that such data could be used to prosecute people seeking abortions in states where it is banned – for instance, if they searched for or traveled to an abortion clinic. Continue reading...

Lastminute.com co-founder, now a peer, says little progress has been made in recent decadesThe businesswoman and peer Martha Lane Fox has criticised the lack of gender diversity in the UK technology industry, saying it has not progressed in 25 years.Lady Lane-Fox of Soho shot to prominence in the late 1990s as the co-founder of Lastminute.com, a travel booking website that became one of the symbols of the UK’s 1990s internet boom. However, she said many of the same issues she had experienced then are still prevalent in the tech industry. Continue reading...

Company must read out public notice to employees at Staten Island warehouse, which won vote to unionize in AprilAmazon will be forced to read out a public notice this week to all employees at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, where workers won the first Amazon union election, stating it will “cease and desist” from retaliating against people involved in union organizing.US district judge Diane Gujarati ruled on 18 November that Amazon cease and desist from retaliating against workers for organizing in the workplace, in response to Amazon employee Gerald Bryson’s termination in April 2020. She included in her ruling that Amazon read out publicly her 30-page decision to employees, which is set to be conducted on Thursday 1 December. Continue reading...

BlockFi announces Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in US as fall of FTX continues to reverberate across industryThe crypto lender BlockFi has become the sector’s latest big operator to declare bankruptcy, as the fallout of the collapse of offshore cryptocurrency exchange FTX continues to spread.BlockFi, which operates in a similar fashion to a conventional bank, paying interest on savings and using customer deposits to fund lending, says it has $256.9m cash in hand. According to court documents, its creditors include FTX itself, to which it owes $275m, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to which it owes $30m. Continue reading...

European parliament is investigating powerful surveillance tool used by governments around the worldVictims of spyware and a group of security experts have privately warned that a European parliament investigatory committee risks being thrown off course by an alleged “disinformation campaign”.The warning, contained in a letter to MEPs signed by the victims, academics and some of the world’s most renowned surveillance experts, followed news last week that two individuals accused of trying to discredit widely accepted evidence in spyware cases in Spain had been invited to appear before the committee investigating abuse of hacking software. Continue reading...

Rapid smart TV upgrade with every streaming service available and a quality ad-free home screenApple’s latest TV streaming box is faster, smaller, more efficient and cheaper than its predecessors, making it one of the best and most reliable smart TV experiences you can get.The third-generation Apple TV 4K costs from £149 ($129/A$219). While £20 cheaper than last year’s model, it is still a premium over rivals from Google, Amazon and others, which are priced at between £50 and £140. Continue reading...

Bitcoin and ethereum prices have plummeted, but it is unlikely the US will ban cryptocurrencies soonThe epic collapse of wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried’s $32bn (£27bn) crypto empire, FTX, looks set to go down as one of the great financial debacles of all time. With a storyline full of celebrities, politicians, sex and drugs, the future looks bright for producers of feature films and documentaries. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumours of the death of crypto itself have been much exaggerated.True, the loss of confidence in “exchanges” such as FTX – essentially crypto financial intermediaries – almost surely means a sustained steep drop in prices for the underlying assets. The vast majority of bitcoin transactions are done “off-chain” in exchanges, not in the bitcoin blockchain itself. These financial intermediaries are vastly more convenient, require much less sophistication to use and do not waste nearly as much energy. Continue reading...

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...