Technology | The Guardian

In this week’s newsletter: As the revolutionary company celebrates a half-century, we look back at everything video games owe to Atari

Despite the growing adoption of security tools in US schools, mass shootings have remained constant throughout the past 30 yearsAfter the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas , an all-too-familiar question emerged: how do we prevent such horror from happening again? A handful of companies have said they have tech solutions that could help.They included the drone firm Axon , which promoted a remotely operated Taser device to be deployed in schools. EdTech companies, including Impero Software, said their student surveillance services could flag warning signs and help prevent the next attack. Continue reading...

Andy Beverley is worried for those who are excluded by cashless systems, and Jane Ghosh says counter services are essentialThank you for highlighting the issue of digital exclusion (Editorial, 23 June). A similar problem is developing with digital payments. For what to many is innocent and inevitable progress, the millions of people in the UK who still rely on cash to live their lives are starting to find themselves excluded from parts of society, with many businesses and even organisations such as community sports centres only accepting card payments.I recently met a Big Issue seller who, despite being provided with a free card reader, couldn’t afford the data for his phone to be able to use it. He is now struggling to sell the magazine because so few shoppers in his area carry cash. It’s vital that the government acts soon to protect access to cash, and I encourage readers to carry a little loose change and occasionally pay in cash, to ensure the continued viability of the system for those who rely on it. We will regret it if it disappears.

AR smart glasses with displays now widely available in UK but must be connected to a smartphone to workThe first widely available augmented reality glasses have hit the UK high street, putting TV shows, movies and games on a big virtual screen just in front of your eyes. But while the Nreal Air are the first of their type on the shelves, they are limited in what consumers can do with them.Many firms have tried to be the first to make AR glasses the next generation of technology, not least Google with its ill-fated Glass back in 2013. Snapchat and Facebook have made attempts, both sporting cameras for recording others, but so far there have been no glasses for consumers with displays for the wearer to view. Until now. Continue reading...

The dating app’s new category offers visibility to those who have long felt isolated when it comes to sexEvery month, nearly 11 million gay men around the world go on the Grindr app to look for sex with other men. Once there, they can scroll through an endless stream of guys, from handsome to homely, bear to twink. Yet when it comes to choosing positions for sex – a crucial criterion for most gay men – the possibilities have long been simply top and bottom. The only other choice available toggles between those roles: verse (for versatile).“Not fitting those roles has made it really tough to find someone,” said Jeremiah Hein, 38, of Long Beach, California. “There’s no category to choose from.” Continue reading...

‘Fearless’ female tech tycoon is at war with Mad Men in a rollercoaster takeover battle for UK-based advertising agencyDays after starting her first job in the male-dominated tech industry, a then 22-year-old Vin Murria was told she would never be successful because she was young, female and Asian.Fast forward four decades and Vinodka (or Vin) Murria’s career highlights include the creation of three tech companies that reached a “unicorn” valuation of about $1bn (£820m). For her latest challenge, she is fighting the Mad Men of Soho in a rollercoaster takeover battle to buy M&C Saatchi, the advertising agency that created the 1997 “Demon Eyes” poster for the Conservatives. Continue reading...

We’re back to the wild west finances of the 1920s as the crypto industry pours huge money into political campaignsOne week ago, as cryptocurrency prices plummeted, Celsius Network – an experimental cryptocurrency bank with more than one million customers that has emerged as a leader in the murky world of decentralized finance, or DeFi – announced it was freezing withdrawals “due to extreme market conditions”.Earlier this past week, Bitcoin dropped 15% over 24 hours to its lowest value since December 2020. Last month, TerraUSD, a stablecoin – a system that was supposed to perform a lot like a conventional bank account but was backed only by a cryptocurrency called Luna – collapsed, losing 97% of its value in just 24 hours, apparently destroying some investors’ life savings.Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

The company has said that Oracle will store all private information and is limiting the number of employees with those privilegesTikTok has said that Oracle will store all the data from its US users, in a bid to allay fears about its safety in the hands of a platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.The move comes as a report from BuzzFeed news, citing leaked audio from TikTok in-house meetings, said ByteDance employees in China have repeatedly accessed private information about US TikTok users. Continue reading...

Letter called for SpaceX to make its work culture more inclusive and ‘define and uniformly respond to all forms of unacceptable behavior’At least five employees were fired by the private rocket company SpaceX after drafting and circulating an open letter criticizing founder Elon Musk and calling on executives at the startup to make the company’s work culture more inclusive, according to two people familiar with the matter.SpaceX did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Continue reading...

Privacy campaign group warns against government’s proposals to move to an ‘opt-out’ modelProposals to scrap pop-up cookie consent boxes on websites will make it easier to spy on web users, a privacy campaign group has warned.Cookie banners are a common feature for web users, who are asked to give their consent for websites as well as marketing and advertising businesses to gather information about their browsing activity. Ministers announced proposals on Friday to move to an “opt-out” model for cookie consent. Continue reading...

Ukrainian president attends trade shows as electronic apparition, urging tech companies to aid ‘digital revolution’ on lend-lease terms

Workers were able to submit questions to the Tesla CEO who has been critical of the company he proposed to buy in a $44bn dealElon Musk met directly with employees at Twitter on Thursday for the first time since he reached a deal to acquire the company in April, focusing on “freedom of speech” in an online address.The billionaire had moved to buy Twitter for $44bn in April but has since been critical of the company, threatening to put the deal on hold over concerns about bots, or fake accounts, that exist on the app. Continue reading...

Ron Wyden says White House right to raise doubts about possible deal for contractor L3Harris to take over surveillance technologyAn influential Democratic lawmaker has said any deal by a US company to acquire NSO Group’s surveillance technology would pose a serious national security risk, and suggested that any intercepts obtained with the software by US intelligence agencies would end up in Israeli hands.The remarks by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who chairs the finance committee and is known for being a strong supporter of privacy rights and a critic of government-sanctioned spying, come after the Guardian and media partners reported that the US defence contractor L3Harris was in talks to acquire NSO’s hacking technology. Continue reading...

Social network uses algorithm to spot posts that appear aggressive, and asks users to be more considerateAsking people to be nice on Twitter makes people nicer on Twitter, the company has announced, hailing the success of an experiment that prompts users to reconsider tweets that might be hurtful or offensive.Since 2020, the social network has tried to encourage users to be more considerate of others, by algorithmically spotting posts that appear aggressive or mean-spirited and prompting users to consider whether they want to send them, asking: “Want to review this before tweeting?” Continue reading...

This Dutch novel takes aim at the depersonalising corrosiveness of the internet, but becomes labouredWhen he launched his takeover of Twitter earlier this year, Elon Musk sparked consternation by declaring he would loosen the social media platform’s content moderation policies – a move that could set Twitter on a collision course with the EU’s digital regulators. In an online world rife with offensive and potentially dangerous material – hate speech, harassment, misinformation, incitements to violence, accounts promoting self-harm and eating disorders – the problem of content moderation is becoming ever more vexed. What counts as harmful content? Who gets to decide, and why?We Had to Remove This Post, the seventh novel by Dutch author Hanna Bervoets and her first to be translated into English, is nothing if not timely. Its young narrator, Kayleigh, has just quit her job as a content moderator with a fictitious big tech subsidiary called Hexa. Her role involved reviewing hundreds of problematic social media posts and deciding, by reference to a complex set of criteria, which ones to take down. This work has wrought havoc on the mental health of her former colleagues, several of whom are bringing a joint lawsuit against the company: one is so paranoid he keeps a stun gun by the bed at night; another “can’t handle loud noises, bright lights, or sudden movement in her peripheral vision”. The novel takes the form of a letter addressed to their lawyer, who has invited Kayleigh to join the legal action. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The show fan favourite plays wing-woman for listeners seeking the ‘Bone Zone’ in Queen of Hearts. Plus: five scandal podcasts we couldn’t switch off

Three Arrows Capital founder takes to Twitter to assuage fears after 25% drop in price of bitcoin in a single dayThe “bloodbath” in the cryptocurrency sector may claim another victim, with the co-founder of multibillion dollar hedge fund Three Arrows Capital using Twitter in an attempt to battle rumours that the company is insolvent following the market collapse.With a net asset value of $18bn (£14.9bn) in its last public statement, the Singapore-based hedge fund was known for taking large, highly leveraged stakes in crypto businesses and cryptocurrencies directly. It holds positions in cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, as well as equity investments in companies such as the BlockFi exchange and options trading platform Deribit. Continue reading...

Company says decision to disable desktop app comes as web developers less likely to make sites compatible with browser, which first graced computers in 1995Microsoft has announced it will kill off its much-maligned legacy internet browser Internet Explorer close to 27 years after it graced desktop computers in 1995.From 15 June, the desktop app will be disabled and users will be redirected to Microsoft’s Edge browser instead. Continue reading...

Employees hit by cryptocurrency crash as bitcoin price has plummeted in recent weeksCrypto exchanges Coinbase and BlockFi are laying off hundreds of staff members, equivalent to a fifth of their workforces, as they struggle to survive the second wave of the ongoing crypto crash.Employees at Coinbase, once the flagship US cryptocurrency exchange, will learn whether they have lost their jobs in an email today. Those who have been laid off will be notified on their personal email account, the chief executive, Brian Armstrong, said, because their access to company systems will be terminated immediately. Continue reading...

The Last Week Tonight host examined Google, Amazon and Apple and efforts to address ‘anti-competitive conduct’John Oliver has called out “anti-competitive conduct” of big tech, urging bipartisan support of bills that would help curb such behaviour.On Last Week Tonight, the host said that “our experiences on the internet are now dominated by a small handful of companies who are getting pretty used to throwing their weight around”. Continue reading...

Blake Lemoine claims of sentience for artificial intelligence bot described as ‘ball of confusion’ by Steven PinkerThe suspended Google software engineer at the center of claims that the search engine’s artificial intelligence language tool LaMDA is sentient has said the technology is “intensely worried that people are going to be afraid of it and wants nothing more than to learn how to best serve humanity”.The new claim by Blake Lemoine was made in an interview published on Monday amid intense pushback from AI experts that artificial learning technology is anywhere close to meeting an ability to perceive or feel things. Continue reading...

Kamal Gandhi, 70, and his Coventry chip shop became a sensation after its name was turned into a catchy songIt has been two weeks since his Coventry chip shop became a TikTok sensation drawing in crowds from around the country, and 70-year-old Kamal Gandhi is exhausted.He has had to take on and train four new staff members, ensure a continuous supply of stock to deal with hundreds of new customers and help manage the long queues snaking down the road outside the now world famous Binley Mega Chippy. Continue reading...

This year’s ABC Classic 100 theme is Music for the Screen: think less Rachmaninoff, more Ratchet & Clank. The presenters share their predictions on how the Australian public has voted

It’s been a long and winding saga for the social media company and the Tesla CEO, filled with threats, breaches and ‘poison pills’Elon Musk on Monday made his most viable threat yet to walk away from a $44bn deal to buy Twitter, accusing the company of committing a “material breach” by failing to disclose the number of bots on the platform.The letter was published on the website of the US financial watchdog on Monday. He had previously tweeted that the deal “cannot move forward” until the spam and fake account issue had been resolved. Continue reading...

Smaller all-in-one wifi speaker packs the best of Sonos for powerful movies, music and multiroom audio – at a lower priceSonos’s latest compact soundbar, the Ray, has achieved a welcome balance for consumers by cutting unnecessary features for a lower price, while still packing top-quality audio for a serious TV sound upgrade and unrivalled multiroom music.Costing £279 ($279/A$399) it is an all-in-one, which means you don’t need a separate subwoofer or other speakers for full sound. It slots under the excellent £449 Beam and £899 Arc soundbars as Sonos’s entry level unit. The question now is – do you really need to spend more? Continue reading...

According to an expert on artificial intelligence, would-be parents will soon be able to opt for cheap and cuddle-able digital offspringName: Tamagotchi kids.Age: Yet to be born, though it won’t be long, says Catriona Campbell. Continue reading...

US financial watchdog asked Musk 10 days before he announced his takeover bid why he had not disclosed his stake soonerThe US financial watchdog has contacted Elon Musk about the disclosure of his stake in Twitter, asking the Tesla chief executive why he appeared to file a crucial form late.The Securities and Exchange Commission published a letter sent to the world’s richest man in which it asks a series of questions about how he declared his acquisition of a 9.2% stake on 4 April. The move prompted a flurry of corporate activity that led to Twitter accepting a $44bn (£35bn) takeover bid from Musk on 25 April – although he has since announced that the deal is “on hold” while he seeks more information about the proportion of fake accounts on Twitter. Continue reading...

At King’s College London, students are designing games that explore diplomacy, drones and the psychological impact of battle. But can they really help?On the second floor of the stately King’s College London building on the Strand, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden are sitting around a table studying a map of Ukraine. They are here to negotiate the future of the country, but they all have ulterior objectives too. Germany wants to ensure the safe transit of refugees; the US wants Russia to cease its disinformation campaign; France wants trade; and Russia needs dozens of sanctions to be lifted. But nobody is giving anything away. It’s tense as hell and the clock is ticking.This is not real, of course, it’s just a game – but it’s a game with serious intentions. Today, the heads of state are being played by four people attending an event organised by the university’s department of war studies. Several students who have taken an MA module entitled Designing Wargames for Education & Analysis are showing games they have created to a select crowd of wargaming professionals, members of the military and representatives of a few big corporations. Continue reading...

Emails describe strategy in 2018 by Sir Richard Dearlove and others to ensure Britain left EU on WTO termsA group of Russian hackers is believed to be behind the release of a cache of emails obtained from a former director of MI6 and other Brexiters unhappy with Theresa May’s failure to negotiate a “clean” EU exit deal.Google said the “clumsy campaign” bore the hallmarks of a Russian group it called Coldriver – and the hackers published the correspondence under the title “Very English Coop d’Etat”, claiming it revealed the existence of shadowy group of pro-Brexit plotters. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC; Saber Interactive

US regulators said social media firm gave advertisers information collected for security purposesTwitter has been fined $150m (£119m) by US authorities after collecting users’ email addresses and phone numbers for security purposes but then using the data to target them with adverts.The social media platform had told users the information would be used to keep their accounts safe, according to a settlement with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Trade Commission. Continue reading...

PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One/Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5; Big Bad Wolf

Meta shareholders also reject proposals seeking more oversight and less power for ZuckerbergAmazon shareholders have rejected 15 resolutions brought forward by investors in a push to influence the company’s environmental impact and treatment of workers.Shareholders voted on Wednesday against all the resolutions, most of which focused on worker rights and other social issues. The resolutions included calls for the company to report on worker health and safety and the treatment of its warehouse workers, and a review of Amazon’s use of plastic and changes to the company’s process for board nominations. Continue reading...

The details of Musk’s financing plans were made public on the day that Twitter shareholders gathered for a scheduled meetingElon Musk has secured additional funding to purchase Twitter, according to financial filings made public on Wednesday, moving the billionaire closer to completing the high-profile deal.The Tesla CEO said in the regulatory filings he has increased his personal funding of the purchase from $27.3bn to $33.5bn and secured an additional $6.25bn in equity financing, reducing the amount of debt the entrepreneur would take on in the $44bn purchase. Continue reading...

UK manufacturer aims to roll out machines capable of performing household chores such as washing up by 2030Dyson has signalled it is placing a “big bet” on producing robots capable of household chores by 2030, as it looks to move beyond the vacuum cleaners, fans and dryers that made its founder one of the wealthiest British businessmen.The company, founded by billionaire Sir James Dyson, on Wednesday published photographs of robot arms being used in household settings, including cleaning furniture, a claw picking up plates, and a hand-like machine picking up a teddy bear. Continue reading...

Snap Inc’s shares fall nearly 40% in early trading as fears grow over global downturnA profit warning from Snapchat’s developer has sent the company’s shares crashing nearly 40% in early trading, triggering the latest in a series of stock market routs that has wiped billions from the value of social media companies amid fears their revenues will be hit by a global economic downturn.“Since we issued guidance on 21 April 2022, the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated further and faster than anticipated,” the company said in an SEC filing published on Monday evening. Snap said it now expected second-quarter revenue and earnings below its guidance range, and told staff it would slow the hiring of new recruits. Continue reading...

Bending your head to use a phone stresses the spine, say chiropractors – and that’s not the only way the devices are injuring and changing usName: Tech neck.Age: Two years old. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Tragic shootings in the US have resurrected the disproven theory games turn people into killers. Why does this myth persist?

Karl Racine accuses Facebook co-founder of direct knowledge of policies that allowed firm to gather data of millions of AmericansWashington DC’s attorney general has sued Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold the Facebook co-founder personally responsible for his alleged role in allowing the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal data of millions of Americans during the 2016 election cycle.The suit, filed in the capital by the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine, alleges that Zuckerberg directly participated in policies that allowed Cambridge Analytica to gather the personal data of US voters without their knowledge in an attempt to help Donald Trump’s election campaign. Continue reading...

Pace of withdrawals in May means ‘stablecoin’ company effectively dealing with slow-motion bank runTether, the multibillion dollar “stablecoin” that functions as the largest bank in the cryptocurrency economy, has paid out $10bn (£8bn) in withdrawals since the crypto crash started in early May.The pace of withdrawals means the company is effectively dealing with a slow-motion bank run, as depositors seek to move their cash to more heavily regulated stablecoins. Continue reading...

Fantasies of a Bitcoin City have been undermined by the country’s huge losses in cryptocurrencyTo its evangelists, bitcoin is a frictionless, empowering form of money that liberates citizens of the world from the shackles of banks and national governments. To sceptics, the cryptocurrency is a tool of kleptocrats and gangsters, environmentally monstrous in its consumption of energy, a digitally glamorised Ponzi scheme whose eventual crash will most hurt those least able to afford a loss.Confidence may or may not have been enhanced by the unveiling, by President Nayib Bukele, of images of a proposed bitcoin-shaped Bitcoin City in El Salvador, funded with a bitcoin bond, the currency’s logo embedded in the central plaza, a metropolis powered with geothermal energy from a nearby volcano. Bukele, the self-styled “coolest dictator in the world”, a former publicist who wears baseball caps back to front, has already made El Salvador the first country to adopt bitcoin as the official currency. “The plan is simple,” he said. “As the world falls into tyranny, we’ll create a haven for freedom.” Continue reading...

The Tesla CEO expressed discontent with Democrats amid speculation he is seeking to back out of his Twitter dealElon Musk said on Twitter that he plans to “vote Republican” and warned of “political attacks” on him, the latest in a series of tweets from the billionaire expressing discontent with Democrats and progressives.Musk’s tweet comes as the Tesla CEO shocked markets this week by announcing his $44bn deal to purchase Twitter was on hold as he awaited further data on fake and spam accounts on the social media platform. Continue reading...

This Golden Gibbo nominee was on the world wide web before Google – here are her favourite online clips, including a folk song made of Alex Jones rants and a classic Clarke and Dawe sketch

In this week’s newsletter: Just like Donald Trump’s political rise, Tesla’s CEO and firms like Tether win by simply not playing by the same rules as everyone else

There are an increasing number of accounts belonging to users aged 60 and older with millions of followersOlder TikTok users are using the online platform, regarded as the virtual playground of teenagers, to defy ageist stereotypes of elderly people as technophobic and frail.Research has found increasing numbers of accounts belonging to users aged 60 and older with millions of followers. Using the platform to showcase their energy and vibrancy, these TikTok elders are rewriting expectations around how older people should behave both on and off social media. Continue reading...

A group examined nine profiles reaching more than 2.79 million people peddling inaccurate information without consequenceAnti-abortion Facebook pages with millions of followers are spreading disinformation about abortion to Spanish speakers with little to no intervention from the social media platform, according to a new report from Naral Pro-Choice America.The abortion rights group examined nine Facebook pages that reach more than 2.79 million people for the first-of-its-kind report, part of its efforts to show how disinformation is disseminated by opponents of abortion. Researchers found that several of the pages “repeatedly spread medically inaccurate information about abortion without any action from Facebook”, highlighting what experts have described as a crisis of Spanish-language misinformation that’s slipping through the cracks. Continue reading...

A New York Times/FX documentary focuses on the deadly disconnect between the Tesla CEO’s promises for Autopilot self-driving tech and its capabilityYou could be forgiven for believing that we’ve already achieved the era of autonomous vehicles. Tesla, the electric car manufacturer run by Elon Musk, refers to a version of its Autopilot software as “Full Self Driving”. The company released a (misleadingly edited) video of an autonomous vehicle navigating city streets, its drivers’ hands on their lap – a style replicated by enthusiasts. Musk has repeatedly assured in speeches and interviews that autonomous vehicles were one to two years away – or, as he put it in 2015, a “solved problem” because “we know what to do and we’ll be there in a few years.” But the existing Autopilot technology has not yet realized those promises and, as a new New York Times documentary illustrates, the gap in expectation and reality has led to several deadly crashes.Elon Musk’s Crash Course, the latest installment in the Times’s deal with FX on Hulu, is not a documentary on Elon Musk, per se. The 75-minute film from producer and director Emma Schwartz focuses specifically on Autopilot, which Musk announced in 2014 and has long billed as the key to an imminent, but as yet unreached, future of self-driving cars. As Musk, the richest man in the world, mulls taking over Twitter, the film redirects attention to longstanding problems at the company arguably most associated with his name and leadership. Through interviews with several former Tesla employees and federal regulators, the film argues that Musk oversold the capability of Autopilot, which Tesla first deployed in 2015, and dangerously lulled consumers into a false sense of security with promises of full self-driving. Continue reading...

The much-hyped and much-delayed sequel to Avatar is set to bring about a return to 3D but are audiences interested?Avatar 2 will be the riskiest film of the year for all sorts of reasons. There’s the issue of whether or not the public actually wants a 12-years-in-the-making sequel to a film that has retained no cultural cachet whatsoever. There’s the fact that, if it flops, James Cameron still has to release three more Avatar movies after this one. But most of all, Avatar 2 will have to convince us all to wear stupid 3D glasses again.A decade ago, 3D was supposed to be the future of cinema. Thanks to the first Avatar, which used the technology to drop us into gorgeous, immersive alien landscapes, every big budget movie enthusiastically strapped itself to this new way of film-making. Peter Jackson made 3D films. Ridley Scott made a 3D film. Martin Scorsese made a 3D film. Ang Lee made a 3D film and won an Oscar for it, for crying out loud. Continue reading...

Tesla CEO and world’s richest person expressed concerns about presence of fake accounts on platformElon Musk has cast further doubt over his $44bn (£35bn) takeover of Twitter after stating the deal “cannot move forward” until the social media company proves that less than 5% of its users are fake or spam accounts.The Tesla chief executive used his Twitter account to say the agreed deal would not progress until the firm showed proof that only a small proportion of its users were fake. Continue reading...

Some camera loan schemes in Britain cost nothing, while other projects offer free or paid-for surveysTo really get to grips with where your home is needlessly costing you energy a thermal imaging camera is a great tool: it shows up exactly where the hotspots for heat loss are, in multicolour.In some parts of Britain it is possible to borrow one for free so you can find where to target your energy-saving efforts without any upfront cost. Continue reading...