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...

Employing remote IT workers who are secretly working for Kim Jong-un’s regime poses risks and may breach sanctions, say US agenciesUS officials have warned businesses against inadvertently hiring IT staff from North Korea, saying that rogue freelancers were taking advantage of remote work opportunities to hide their true identities and earn money for Pyongyang.An advisory issued by the state and treasury departments and the FBI said the effort was intended to circumvent US and UN sanctions, and bring in money for North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The officials said companies who hired and paid such workers may be exposing themselves to legal consequences for sanctions violations. Continue reading...

Ken McCallum, the director general of M15, said malicious profiles were being used on an ‘industrial scale’A mobile phone app has been launched that will help social media users to detect fake profiles and speed up their removal.The Think Before You Link app will help people to spot characteristics of fraudulent profiles used by spies and other malicious actors, according to the Cabinet Office and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure. Continue reading...

Recharging at home is 43% more expensive than a year ago – but EVs are still much cheaper to run than petrol and diesel carsWhile petrol price rises may have made the headlines, the energy crisis has also been hitting owners of electric cars in the pocket. The cost of charging at home has risen by 43% for some drivers, while the already higher cost of on-the-road recharges has gone up 25%.As energy prices are forced up due to rising costs for suppliers, specialist charging deals for drivers have become more scarce. And now there are suggestions that people may put off the purchase of an electric car as the cost-of-living crisis takes hold. Continue reading...

Top sound in a new, more comfortable design, with good battery life, controls and wingsThe latest wireless earbuds from Sennheiser are smaller, longer lasting and have better sound and noise cancelling than their predecessors, making them some of the best on the market.Priced at £219.99 ($249.95/A$399.5), the third-generation Momentum true wireless earbuds look set to dethrone Sony’s WF-1000XM4 as the best-sounding earbuds you can buy. Continue reading...

Apple is no longer the most valuable company, Meta took a $230bn hit, Amazon reported its first loss since 2015, but a slump ‘is a big question mark’Jeff Bezos knew this day was coming. Back in April the Amazon boss warned of an impending market slowdown, tweeting that the epic tech boom experienced during the last two years could not last for ever.“Most people dramatically underestimate the remarkableness of this bull run,” he said. “Such things are unstoppable … until they aren’t. Continue reading...

‘Algorithmic stablecoin’, whose collapse triggered multibillion-dollar selloff, turns off blockchainTerraUSD, the “algorithmic stablecoin” whose collapse prompted a multibillion-dollar selloff across crypto markets, has turned off its blockchain and been delisted from major exchanges, in effect shuttering the project for good.However, the wider impact of the project’s failure appears to have been constrained. TerraUSD was once valued at more than $40bn (£33bn). Continue reading...

David Harville is one of six others charged for harassing the Boston duo who ran a new newsletter criticizing the companyA former eBay executive pleaded guilty on Thursday to participating in a scheme to terrorize the creators of an online newsletter that included the delivery of live spiders and other disturbing items to their home.David Harville, eBay’s former director of global resiliency, is the final onetime eBay employee charged in the case to plead guilty. Six others have admitted to their roles in the harassment campaign targeting a Massachusetts couple who publish the newsletter EcommerceBytes, which eBay executives viewed as critical of the company. Continue reading...

Encrypted messaging apps could be threatened by requirement for platforms to search for and combat child sexual abuseCritics have accused the European Commission of seeking to end encrypted communications after the EU’s executive body unveiled strict regulations for messaging apps intended to fight the spread of child sexual abuse imagery.Under the proposed regulations, messaging services and web hosts would be required to search for, and report, child abuse material – even in the case of encrypted messaging services like Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s WhatsApp that cannot be scanned in such a way. Continue reading...

The story of Eidos’s cult football management sim shows the limits of brand recognition – and suggests Fifa would have been better off sticking with Electronic ArtsThey think it’s all over … it is now. The lucrative corporate marriage that brought us 30 years of annual football simulations, and made billions of dollars in the process, is now defunct. Fifa and Electronic Arts (EA) have parted ways. And now the dust has settled on a day of frantic press releases, hype and guarded interviews, what sort of challenges face both entities as they jostle to reclaim the future of the footie sim for themselves?Here’s my pretty safe bet: Fifa is going to have a tough time of it. Now freed from the exclusivity clause granted to EA, the company apparently has a range of “non-simulation” games due out this year from various developers. It’s likely these will be casual titles, probably for smartphones, crammed with micro-transactions and perhaps aimed at the huge Asian market for arena-based multiplayer games. If there’s a plausible Fifa: Clash of Teams game, perhaps with some NFTs thrown in, you can bet someone is working on it. Continue reading...

Brighton festival

New Pro earbuds and upcoming Pixel 7 phones, tablet and software shown off during virtual eventGoogle has announced a series of new products as it looks to compete with Apple on tablets and smartwatches. It has unveiled a lower-cost smartphone, high-end earbuds and a watch due later this year, as well as Android updates.During the keynote kicking off its IO developer conference, Google set out its intention to build a broader collection of own-brand devices rather than rely on third parties such as Samsung using its software. Continue reading...

Explainer: Questions asked about whether other ‘stablecoins’ may follow suit – and if so, what else?Billions were wiped off the cryptocurrency market this week with the collapse of the terra “stablecoin”. But is its failure just another example of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of the sector, or could it be the beginning of a wider downturn? Continue reading...

Publisher has revealed EA Sports FC as the new brand for its bestselling series and promises innovationsElectronic Arts has announced that it will cease making Fifa-branded football games next year. From 2023, the series will continue under a new brand, EA Sports FC.In a press release on the decision, EA stated that licensing deals remain in place with 19,000 players, 700 teams, and more than 30 leagues from around the world, as well as with UEFA, which means the Champions League will still be a part of the game, although the World Cup will not. Continue reading...

Tesla boss says decision in January last year was ‘morally bad and foolish in the extreme’Elon Musk has said he will reverse Twitter’s ban on the former US president Donald Trump if the Tesla boss completes a takeover of the social media platform.Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021, citing repeated violations of company rules and its judgment that his tweets were “highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021”, referring to the attack on the building by his supporters. Continue reading...

Virtual reality and live performance combine in a show that asks audiences to consider if political violence is ever justifiableIn a series of vaults adjacent to the Tower of London that used to house fast-food restaurants and shops selling trinkets to tourists, a portal into Jacobean London is being constructed.The Gunpowder Plot is an ambitious immersive experience, created by Layered Reality – the company behind the immersive The War of the Worlds – in collaboration with Historic Royal Palaces. It invites audiences to step back in time and engage with the events of 1605, when Guy Fawkes and a group of Catholic conspirators plotted to blow up parliament and King James I. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Thousands of pounds stolen in cases seen by the Guardian in reports from City of London policeThieves are targeting digital currency investors on the street in a wave of “crypto muggings”, police have warned, with victims reporting that thousands of pounds have been stolen after their mobile phones were seized.Anonymised crime reports provided to the Guardian by City of London police, as part of a freedom of information request, reveal criminals are combining physical muscle with digital knowhow to part people from their cryptocurrency. Continue reading...

The Tesla tycoon’s complex bid for the social media platform will load the tech firm with debtIf you want to know who the world’s richest man has on speed dial, then a regulatory filing on Thursday provided an insight. Elon Musk announced a score of new backers for his $44bn (£35.6bn) Twitter takeover, including Oracle tycoon Larry Ellison, the crypto market’s leading trading platform, the Qatari sovereign wealth fund and a Saudi prince.If this was Tesla’s boss displaying his power network, it was also an admission that – despite recent words to the contrary – the numbers behind his audacious bid do matter. Discussing his offer last month, Musk said: “I don’t care about the economics at all.” For some of Wall Street’s biggest banks, Tesla’s shareholders and even Twitter users, the economics are very important indeed. Continue reading...

A rainy day with Flapjack the schnauzer brought comparisons with Caravaggio and a former Labour chancellorFlapjack the miniature schnauzer was the first dog Emma F Wright began walking. But what began as a favour for a friend turned into something of a second job, and now the Nottingham-based photographer follows the same route, under the Trent Bridge, several times a week with various local dogs.“I’d noticed before that on rainy days, water from the road above would seep through and create a bit of a puddle in the same place. Schnauzers recognise and greet each other as if they’ve known them their whole life. On this day, I realised Flapjack was looking at his own reflection. Continue reading...

Imminent end to legal abortion sparks concerns over how law enforcement might access data to prosecute patients and providersA leaked draft opinion suggesting the US supreme court may overturn the landmark abortion rights decision Roe v Wade has renewed concerns over the ways US law enforcement could ask tech companies to hand over Americans’ data if they were to prosecute individuals getting or providing abortion services.Tech firms and data brokers already collect, store and often sell years’ worth of information on their users. There are few federal regulations that protect such data, making the information, which includes data on location, internet searches, and communication history, extremely valuable and easily accessible to law enforcement. Continue reading...

Despite their chunky graphics and analog sounds, multiplayer sports sims of the 1980s defined a whole era of gaming – can their legacy live on?The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics are memorable for a lot of things – the jetpack at the opening ceremony, the historic performance by Carl Lewis, the greater focus on female athletes – but for nerds of a certain age, they will always be remembered for something quite different: broken joysticks. This was the first Olympic tournament of the mass video game era and it prompted a whole new genre of sports sims, designed to replicate the physical exertion of actually doing sport. I can just about recall watching the real Los Angeles games on TV, but it was the household tournaments I held with friends that really bring back memories.There’s some disagreement over where the multi-sport sim originated. At the burgeoning games studio Activision, pioneering designer David Crane had thought for a long time about making a sport game that simulated physical effort and his title The Activision Decathlon, arrived in late 1983, riding the growing hype for the LA Olympics to come. It allowed players to compete in 10 events, waggling the joystick left and right as quickly as possible to run faster and jump higher. At roughly the same time, Japanese company Konami brought the multi-event sports sims to the arcade with its brilliant coin-op Track and Field. This game allowed up to four players to compete in six athletics events, but instead of waggling a joystick, players used a two-button interface, alternatively pressing (or rather “bashing”) each one as quickly as possible. Continue reading...

The app requires you to share photos of what you’re doing at a specific moment, creating a drab portrait of realitySorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there is a new app to know about. BeReal, touted as the “anti-Instagram”, is currently the No 1 free app on the App Store in the US. It promises, slightly unnervingly, “a new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life”.It works by sending an amber-alert-style push notification to all its users at once – one that includes two panic-inducing yellow warning sign emojis and a message that it is “time to BeReal”. Upon receiving this missive, everyone uploads a photo of what they are doing at that exact moment in time, regardless of whether they happen to be dancing in a club with their friends or sitting alone on their sofa and staring at the wall. Continue reading...

Meta, formerly Facebook, denies claims the blocking of non-news pages like hospitals and charities was an intentional negotiating tactic, and says it was the result of a ‘technical error’

According to the government, Digital Markets Unit will protect small businesses and consumersA new tech watchdog will be given the power to impose multibillion-pound fines on major firms such as Google and Facebook if they breach rules designed to protect consumers and businesses.The Digital Markets Unit (DMU) will protect small businesses from predatory practices and will give consumers greater control over how their data is used, the government said. Continue reading...

Paz Estaban told committee spyware was used on 18 Catalan activists with judicial approval, sources sayThe Catalan government is calling for answers “from the highest level” after the head of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI) reportedly confirmed that 18 members of the regional independence movement were spied on with judicial approval.The apparent admission – to a congressional committee – came two weeks after cybersecurity experts said at least 63 people connected with the Catalan independence movement had been targeted or infected with Pegasus spyware, and three days after the Spanish government said the phones of the prime minister and the defence minister had been targeted with Pegasus. Continue reading...