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From rants about famous buildings to unabashed property porn, TikTok is full of riffs on architecture and design. Our man enters a world of eccentric carpeting, lurid mansions and in-depth pavement analysisOne minute, he’s sitting in a fast-food restaurant in a three-piece suit, twirling his moustache and miming popping a glock to the sounds of Polo G and Lil Tjay. The next, he’s standing at a traffic intersection, extolling the virtues of protected bicycle lanes. This is Mr Barricade, the social media persona of California traffic engineer Vignesh Swaminathan, who introduces niche topics with succinct panache to audiences that might never have stopped to consider the radius of a curb or the racial history of pedestrian crossings. His strangely alluring cocktail of dad dancing and traffic chat has garnered more than 30m likes. Or maybe it’s all thanks to that magnificent moustache.The worlds of architecture, design and urbanism on TikTok can be confusing places to the uninitiated. Users swerve between educational explainer videos, interior design advice, and “Hey guys, here’s a cool building I found on the internet” monologues, along with thoughtful criticism and unbridled ranting. Plus there’s oodles of property porn to sate your Through the Keyhole desires. Continue reading...

World’s wealthiest person says proposed billionaires tax led to poll, the result of which sent price falling

Joel Anderson takes us back to 1992, unpicking the events leading up to Rodney King’s brutal beating and historic unrest. Plus: Hugh Hefner’s rise and fall, and northern writers tell the stories of their home countiesSlow Burn

Zillow reportedly has about 7,000 homes that it now needs to unload – many for prices lower than it originally paidOnline shopping can be dangerous, as the US property website Zillow has belatedly come to realize. While many of us wasted countless hours during the pandemic clicking through real estate listings on Zillow and daydreaming about the sort of pad we’d buy if we had deep pockets, the company was running a side-business, separate from its property searching website, in which it deployed algorithms to help it buy houses themselves and then flip them.It did a lot of buying, but hasn’t been so great at the selling. This week the company announced that its home-buying division, Offers, had lost more than $300m over the last few months. Offers will now be shut down and about 2,000 people laid off. Zillow reportedly has about 7,000 homes that it now needs to unload; many for prices lower than it originally paid. Continue reading...

A new analysis reveals that thousands of climate misinformation posts received up to 1.36m views everydayThe scale of climate misinformation on Facebook is “staggering” and “increasing quite substantially”, a new analysis of thousands of posts has found.A report released on Thursday by the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent watchdog group, and the environmental non-profit Stop Funding Heat, analyzed a dataset of more than 195 Facebook pages and groups. Researchers found an estimated 45,000 posts downplaying or denying the climate crisis, which have received a combined total of between 818,000 and 1.36m views. Continue reading...

I’m determined to hold out for as long as I can, but these days you need a QR code for everything from ordering at a restaurant to boarding a flightI’ve always gotten by fine without owning a smartphone – until now. Covid has made my already obsolete 90s-designed Nokia flip-phone nearly useless. I’m suddenly surrounded by QR codes. There are now Airbnb doors I can’t open, cars I can’t start, menus I can’t read. Paper menus have vanished; ordering food has become an ordeal.At a recent dinner with friends, after some initial chatting, everyone stared at menus on their phones. I sat there for a minute looking around the table and then whispered to my neighbor, discreetly asking to look on. When I eat out alone, I show my flip-phone to the waiter and ask for a proper menu. After an eye-roll, they’ll either bring out a paper menu from some vault in the back or hand me their own phone to use. Continue reading...

Xbox Series S/X; Playground Games/Microsoft

Decision against company at heart of Pegasus project reflects deep concern about impact of spyware on US national security interestsNSO Group has been placed on a US blacklist by the Biden administration after it determined the Israeli spyware maker has acted “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US”.The finding by the commerce department represents a major blow to the Israeli company and reveals a deep undercurrent of concern by the US about the impact of spyware on national security. Continue reading...

Analysis: The question now is what effect the US move will have on Israel and on foreign governments who use NSO’s spywareThe US commerce department’s blacklist is usually reserved for America’s worst enemies, such as Chinese companies that have been accused of aiding human right abuses, and Russians who proliferate biological and chemical weapons programmes.But on Wednesday, Israel’s NSO Group joined their ranks, marking a rare decision by the Biden administration to include a major technology company that is closely regulated by the Israeli government on its list of entities that threaten US national security. Continue reading...

We have never been more reliant on the internet – yet Pamela Paul still gets DVDs in the post and buys CD players. Why? Because we have lost more to the digital era than we realise, she saysPamela Paul must be one of the last subscribers to the branch of Netflix that allows its users to see films via the stone-age practice of receiving DVDs in the post. I know this because, two days after we talk, she sends me a blurry photograph of her last hire – The Anniversary Party, a 2001 comedy starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming – along with a Q&A she did for the New York Times, about the art of what she calls “sliding backward on tech”. Its basic point is summarised in one of Paul’s characteristic bits of aphoristic wisdom: “In general, when I hear the phrase ‘There’s an app for that’, my first question is: ‘Does there need to be?’”Paul, 50, is the editor of the New York Times Book Review. She does not use any streaming services. As late as 2019, she bought – read this slowly – portable CD players for two of her children. As a matter of principle, she refuses to own or use anything resembling a tablet, except her phone. “I don’t want a tablet,” she says, her face adopting an expression of mild disgust. “People have tried to give me a tablet; I want nothing to do with that tablet. I would probably have to be paid a salary of, like, $250,000 a year to use a Kindle or an iPad to read on. It would be that unpleasant.” Continue reading...

It takes special design to keep players exploring, and game developer Arkane, known for its refined aesthetic, has some unexpected sourcesThis year, there is one game world I have enjoyed exploring more than any other. We’re so spoiled for visually rich open environments these days, it takes something special to keep players immersed, to keep them wandering about looking at stuff, just for the sake of it. Deathloop is a shining example. Developer Arkane is known for its highly refined and individual approach to game art, thanks to the astonishing Dishonored titles, set in a steam-punk dystopia of rats, robotic guards and ornate classical architecture. This time around, the team created a strange Groundhog Day-like adventure set on an island populated by mad scientists and spoiled billionaires, all looking to gain immortality by living the same day over and over again, thanks to a localised space-time phenomenon.The island of Blackreef, where the whole game takes place, provides a fascinating example of how Arkane works. At first, the team built a timeline to explain the variety of natural and human-made features in each region. The location itself is a remote, wintery outpost, heavily inspired by the Faroe Islands, with craggy cliffs and windswept grasslands. On top of this are the monolithic concrete buildings constructed by a group of military researchers who arrived in the 1930s to investigate the island’s weird phenomena. And then, decades later came Aeon, a cabal of rich tech bros, looking for a new playground. “It was kind of like if Elon Musk had said, ‘let’s go to the Bermuda Triangle and study it’!” explains art director Seb Mitton. “They came with all this money and realised they could create these strange events. They said ‘we’re going to start this loop and we’re going to live forever.’” Continue reading...

The Dutch duo Studio Drift’s multipart show at the Shed in New York, Fragile Future, deconstructs the materials of daily lifeWhat happens if you reverse engineer the raw materials of everyday objects such as an iPhone, a Starbucks cup or a bicycle? Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of the Dutch art collective Studio Drift attempted to find out by stripping back the elements and depicting them proportionately in cubes and prisms.Titled Materialism, their show at the New York event space the Shed asks viewers to put aside culturally constructed ideas of various chemicals and view the objects with a renewed sense of wonder.The iPhone 4S is made of specially developed glass along with steel, polycarbonate, graphite, copper, nickel, and a range of other materials. Continue reading...

The social media giant is putting a stop to its technology that identifies people in photos. We look at what prompted the move and what it means for usersFacebook has announced it is deleting about 1bn “faceprints” it used as part of a facial recognition system for photo tagging, citing concerns with the technology.Meta, the company formally known as Facebook, announced on Tuesday it would end its use of facial recognition technology in the coming weeks. A third of Facebook’s users, or about 1 billion people, had opted into the service, Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence Jerome Pesenti said. Continue reading...

A computer company for gamers says it filed to trademark the name a year agoMeta PCs, an Arizona-based company that sells computers, laptops and software for gamers was an unremarkable retail outfit a week ago. Then on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company would be changing its name to Meta and it found itself in an IP war with tech’s biggest behemoth.Lucky for Meta PCs, it’s already a few months ahead of Facebook in having the name trademarked. According to a document shared by TMZ, the company filed for its trademark in August, a little over a year after it was started. Continue reading...

Twenty accounts and groups tracked by NewsGuard gained more than 370,000 followers over past year

The average American has 47 unread text messages and 1,602 unopened emails. No wonder it sometimes all gets too muchWhen Senait Lara, a 28-year-old video producer in Los Angeles, was confronted by her friends about her lack of communication in their group chat, the accusations were as follows: she only caught up every few days; when she did, it was barely an interaction – Lara spent time “hearting” messages instead of responding with words; and sometimes she would never respond at all. Lara did not deny it. She knew she sometimes preferred to throw her phone in a corner and completely avoid it rather than deal with the onslaught of requests.It wasn’t until Lara addressed her behaviour in therapy that she realized she felt anxious from texting because of her tendency to please those around her. As her therapist described, people-pleasers are less likely to have boundaries around communication, which smartphones barely provide. “I never understood why I would be so difficult to communicate with, but then I realized it was all online,” she said. Continue reading...

Barbican, London

We have every tool we need to tackle the climate crisis. Here’s what some key sectors are doingThe climate emergency is the biggest threat to civilisation we have ever faced. But there is good news: we already have every tool we need to beat it. The challenge is not identifying the solutions, but rolling them out with great speed.Some key sectors are already racing ahead, such as electric cars. They are already cheaper to own and run in many places – and when the purchase prices equal those of fossil-fueled vehicles in the next few years, a runaway tipping point will be reached. Continue reading...

Drinkaware under fire after deleting booze-consumption history of some users following relaunchOne of Britain’s leading alcohol charities has been criticised over the relaunch of its popular lifestyle app that wiped the drinking history of its users along with red-flag warnings of harmful consumption.Funded by the industry, Drinkaware promotes its alcohol consumption app to help curb excessive drinking and monitor consumption. The app, which was launched in 2014, has had more than 600,000 downloads. Continue reading...

The explosive documents from Frances Haugen have renewed calls for legislation, but actually passing it is another storyIt’s been a rocky few weeks for the company formerly known as Facebook.First came the Facebook papers, a series of blockbuster reports in the Wall Street Journal based on a cache of internal documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower. Continue reading...

The firm’s agreement to buy 100,000 cars from Elon Musk’s company could change people’s minds about EVs for goodOn Tuesday, Hertz, the car-rental firm that recently emerged from bankruptcy, announced that it had made a deal to buy 100,000 cars from Tesla for what knowledgeable sources estimate to be worth $4bn. On learning this, my first thought was that if this is what insolvency is like, please direct me to the nearest bankruptcy court. My second thought, though, was that this could be a significant moment on the road to wider adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).The reason is, as anyone who has rented conventional cars will know, is that the best way of having a realistic test drive of a vehicle is to rent one for a week or two on holiday. As Teslas become available via Hertz, many more people will have a chance to experience what an EV is like. This is important because, generally, only geeks and masochists (like this columnist) are early adopters of novel technology and normal cautious consumers regard EVs as rather exotic and peculiar, not something you’d rely on for commuting or the school run. Continue reading...

Google’s Street View helps us navigate the world, but it’s also a portal on forgotten places and secret momentsI am leaning against a wall outside my secondary school in my home town of Canterbury, waiting for my mother to pick me up. She is late, as usual. I rest my head on the stone wall, which is obsidian smooth with the occasional sharp edge. I can feel a flinty knuckle of rock pressing into the base of my skull. I shift uncomfortably in my non-regulation high heels and watch the other parents come and go. I am irritated and worried I won’t have enough time to finish my GCSE coursework that evening. And then she arrives, and I slam the car door shut with more force than is needed.Only I am no longer a sullen teenager and I am not in Canterbury. I am on my sofa in south London, walking the streets of my former home town on Google Street View. I drag and drop Pegman, the Street View icon, outside my old school. He flails for a moment before freefalling feet-first, and then I am a teenager, walking the passageways of my youth. I can feel the cold stones under my hand as I trace my palm along the wall. I spent so many afternoons waiting for my mother in this spot that it feels as if there is an imprint of me forever leaning there, a ghostlike presence for today’s students to bustle past. Continue reading...

Zuckerberg wants us to all turn our attention to a land of make-believe to distract from his PR disaster while Bezos and Musk are obsessed with leaving the planetOn Thursday Facebook announced a groundbreaking and innovative new distraction from their PR disaster. As journalists continue to pore over thousands of leaked documents that show the company is fully aware that it is degrading democratic societies, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is changing its name to Meta, has a new logo that looks like a Na’vi bending over, and is going to pivot from spreading vaccine disinformation to creating a super-lame version of Second Life.Zuckerberg promised that in the future we would all work, play and “organise surprise birthday parties” as avatars in Facebook’s virtual-reality “Metaverse”. His examples of how this might work had all the cultural awareness of a Kendall Roy social media strategy. Continue reading...

Rebrand mocked under hashtag #FacebookDead while Canadian firm’s shares get unexpected boostFacebook’s name change has been roundly mocked on social media, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Israel: Meta sounds like the Hebrew word for “dead”.As images of Facebook’s name superimposed on a tombstone were shared online, Dr Nirit Weiss-Blatt, a tech expert, wrote in a tweet directed towards Facebook’s communications team: “In Hebrew, *Meta* means *Dead*.” The author of The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication added: “The Jewish community will ridicule this name for years to come.” Meta sounds like the feminine form of the Hebrew word. Continue reading...

Major involvement in launch of Meta could saddle it with baggage from founder’s primary ventureMark Zuckerberg’s effort to remove “negative associations” between Facebook and its parent company may be undermined by his decision to front the launch of its rebranding as Meta, experts have said.Facebook’s CEO announced the change on Thursday, revealing that the name Meta would encompass the social media network, Instagram, WhatsApp and the virtual reality brand Oculus. Continue reading...

Leaked papers detail emergency exercise that followed 2019 mass murder in New ZealandFacebook trained its artificial intelligence systems to detect and block any future attempt to livestream a shooting spree with “police/military body cams footage,” and other violent material, in the aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack.The emergency exercise – detailed in corporate papers leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen – followed the March 2019 mass murder in the New Zealand city, described internally as “a watershed moment” for the Facebook Live video service. Continue reading...

Data protection advocate Mariano delli Santi on whether we should worry about targeted advertisingWe all believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Well, a little bit. That’s according to a Norwegian professor who recently argued that conspiratorial thinking spans everything from 5G theories to believing the referee really is against your team. Mine? I think my phone is somehow listening in. How else can I explain the ads that appear for a product just as I’m talking about it? I asked Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer with data protection advocate Open Rights Group.As hills to die on go, I could do worse than “my phone is listening to me”, right?

Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Meta morphosis fills me with a deep sense of dread. And some companies are too toxic to rebrand“Facebook”. The word paints a thousand pictures, every one of them a portrait of some element of the human condition I could happily live without. Message requests from veterans in Montana that read, “Hello beautiful Lady.” A friend’s mum reposting an announcement about the increased risk of dog-napping in a town 200 miles from where she lives. Suggested posts for things I have no interest in: classic cars, muay thai and the Duchess of Cambridge. Pages where guys can share pictures of their sportfishing equipment and views on immigrants, if that also comes up. A distant relative’s attempts at winning a cottage in a staggeringly fake-looking contest. A helpful infographic about how vaccines can cause brain polyps. Engagement photoshoots. Fascism.Yet it seems we are at the end of an era. After 17 years, billions of dollars in profit and some minor controversies involving the erosion of world democracy, Facebook has changed its name. From now on, the parent company will be known as Meta, to reflect the company’s shift in focus to the next digital frontier: the metaverse (or virtual reality to non-nerds). Continue reading...

The Bridgerton star joins forces with Camilla Whitehill for a glorious send-up of rural Ireland. Plus: an absorbing investigation in Mississippi Goddam, and Esther Perel returnsWhistle Through the Shamrocks (from 1 Nov)

Despite posting lower than expected revenues, iPhone 13 sales nearly doubled while iPad sales grew by 21%Apple shares slid slightly on Thursday after the company announced lower than expected revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021.The company posted a quarterly revenue of $83.4bn, up 29% year over year but still short of analyst predictions of $84.85bn. Continue reading...

Share price down 4% in after-hours trading on news that third-quarter earnings fell to $3.2bn compared with $3.6bn last yearAmazon’s profits declined by the largest percentage in more than four years as the online giant said it has spent heavily on coping with the pandemic and delivered a downbeat forecast for the holiday season.The news sent Amazon’s share price down 4% in after-hours trading. Continue reading...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social media giant will change the name of its holding company to Meta, in a rebrand that comes as the company faces a series of public relations crises. Zuckerberg made the announcement at Facebook’s annual conference on Thursday, where he outlined his vision for the ‘metaverse’ – a digital world built over our own, comprising virtual reality headsets and augmented reality

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: People spend thousands on TVs and laptops – but not £200 to supercharge their internet speed

The pandemic accelerated the rise of this digital piecework where humans support AI

In the second episode of Guardian Australia’s new podcast, Alyx Gorman, Michael Sun and Steph Harmon bring in Rashna Farrukh to discuss how TikTok is leaching into every corner of the internet – and the algorithms that know more about us than we do. Later in the episode: Michael gets trolled by a homeware memeShow notes: Continue reading...

Federal Communications Commission action is the latest pushback against what the US sees as infiltration by Chinese tech firmsThe US communications regulator has voted to revoke China Telecom’s licence in America over national security concerns in the latest pushback by Washington against what it deems possible infiltration of key networks by Chinese companies.The decision by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) means China Telecom Americas must now discontinue US services within 60 days. China Telecom, the largest Chinese telecommunications company, has had authorisation to provide telecommunications services for nearly 20 years in the United States. Continue reading...

Profits are strong, shares are up and its users are increasing. But the social media company is still in big troubleUh-oh, it looks as if Mark Zuckerberg has caught on to the media’s dastardly plot to destroy Facebook! As you have probably noticed, the technology behemoth has been in the news nonstop recently, as media outlets plough through thousands of pages of internal documents leaked by the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Most people might think journalists reporting revelations about one of the world’s most powerful companies was par for the course. Zuckerberg, however, seems to think it’s some sort of vast conspiracy.“My view is that what we’re seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company,” Zuckerberg said during an earnings call on Monday. Sounds a little Trumpy, doesn’t it? Admit no wrong; instead, cast yourself as the victim of the malicious mainstream media. Continue reading...

The company reported a 6% increase in daily active users and a revenue that grew to $29.01bn thanks to online advertisingFacebook’s profit topped $9bn during its most recent financial quarter, clearing investor predictions even as the company faces an onslaught of negative publicity over a major release of whistleblower documents.The company revealed in its Monday earnings report that it saw a 6% year-on-year increase in daily active users, reaching an average of 1.93 billion for September 2021. Its revenue grew 35% to $29.01bn, thanks to a boom in online advertising. Continue reading...

Much of the blame for the world's increasingly polarised politics lies with social networks and the radicalising effects of their services, the whistleblower Frances Haugen told MPs as she called for external regulation to reduce social harm. The company’s internal culture prioritised profitability over its impact on the wider world, said Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team

The woman whose revelations have rocked Facebook tells how spending time with her mother, a priest, motivated her to speak outThis was not Frances Haugen’s plan A. The Facebook whistleblower says she does not like being the centre of attention, but what she saw while working at Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire compelled her into action – and made her famous.“When I look at what I did, this was not my plan A. It wasn’t my plan B, it wasn’t my plan C. It was like my plan J or something,” she laughs. “No one sat me down and said ‘what I want you to do is whistleblow’.” Continue reading...

Frances Haugen says chief executive has not shown any desire to shield users from the consequences of harmful contentThe Facebook whistleblower whose revelations have tipped the social media giant into crisis has launched a stinging new criticism of Mark Zuckerberg, saying he has not shown any readiness to protect the public from the harm his company is causing.Frances Haugen told the Observer that Facebook’s founder and chief executive had not displayed a desire to run the company in a way that shields the public from the consequences of harmful content. Continue reading...

In October 2001, the music industry was riven by piracy and had no idea how to solve it. Enter Steve Jobs, whose new device created a digital music market – and made Apple into a titanIn 2001, the record business was in freefall due to digital piracy, and the best way out of this accelerating crisis came in the shape of a white device the size of a deck of cards. The iPod, launched 20 years ago this week, was also how Apple’s Steve Jobs was able to prey on a failing business in order to avenge his own past failures – exiled between 1985 and 1997 from the company he co-founded – by turning Apple into the most profitable company in history.Before the iPod lifeline arrived in October 2001, record labels were in full panic mode. In its annual report for 2001, record company trade body IFPI called it “a turbulent” year, blaming filesharing and CD burning for a revenue slump. Jay Berman was chief exective of IFPI at the time and calls the scale of filesharing then “a crisis of momentous proportions” for record labels. “It really was,” he says, “a foreign invasion.” Continue reading...

Revelations about World Doctors Alliance pages raise questions about platform’s efforts to control misinformationAn international pressure group that spread false and conspiratorial claims about Covid-19 more than doubled the average number of interactions it got on Facebook in the first six months of 2021 in spite of renewed efforts to curb misinformation on the platform, according to a report.Pages owned by the World Doctors Alliance – a group of current and former medical professionals and academics from seven countries – received 617,000 interactions in June 2021, up from 255,000 in January, according to a six-month rolling average. Continue reading...

The company’s car sales are set to overtake last year’s figures even as construction of its new Texas factory is underwayTesla saw its biggest quarterly net earnings in history, the company said on Wednesday, propelled by record electric vehicle sales last summer, amid a shortage of computer chips and other materials.The company made $1.62bn in the third quarter, beating its old record of $1.14bn, set just in the second quarter of this year. The profit was nearly five times greater than the $331m Tesla made in the same quarter in 2019. Continue reading...

Boris Johnson appeared to back idea at PMQs but sources say online harms bill may not include itGovernment sources have rowed back on Boris Johnson’s apparent commitment to criminal sanctions for tech company bosses who fail to tackle harmful or illegal content.However, the Guardian understands that the new culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, who has first-hand experience of online abuse, is minded to take a tougher approach on sanctions than her predecessor Oliver Dowden, though she is still taking advice. Continue reading...

Boris Johnson has promised to present the delayed online harms bill to parliament before Christmas after the killing of David Amess. He made his comments after Keir Starmer urged him to work collaboratively in clamping down on web-based extremism. Johnson also appeared to agree to another of Starmer’s requests, that the bill would include a commitment to possible criminal sanctions against tech company bosses who do not do enough to remove harmful or illegal content

As Facebook reportedly plans to unveil a new corporate name, we look at how four other firms faredFacebook is planning to rebrand with a new corporate name to reflect its shift to building the metaverse, it has been reported. According to the Verge, the announcement could be made during Facebook’s Connect conference on 28 October. Here are four other companies that recently tried rebranding, and how it went. Continue reading...