Government announces new contracts to install gigabit level fibre coverage for 131,000 households and businessesThe last corners of England and Wales yet to be covered by a 5bn push to widen fast broadband could finally get access to rapid downloads, streaming and video calls after the government announced 289m in new taxpayer-funded contracts enabling coverage.After some people in broadband blackspots were forced to turn to Elon Musk's Starlink satellite-enabled internet connections, the latest deals to boost connectivity should give 131,000 households and businesses in village and rural internet deserts gigabit-level fibre coverage - allowing a high-definition movie to be downloaded in around a minute. Continue reading...
Instagram profile of proud Black queer momma', created by Meta, said her development team included no Black peopleMeta is deleting Facebook and Instagram profiles of AI characters the company created over a year ago after users rediscovered some of the profiles and engaged them in conversations, screenshots of which went viral.The company had first introduced these AI-powered profiles in September 2023 but killed off most of them by summer 2024. However, a few characters remained and garnered new interest after the Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times late last week that the company had plans to roll out more AI character profiles. Continue reading...
Settlement of proposed class-action lawsuit represent nine hours of profit for Apple, which has denied wrongdoingApple has agreed to pay $95m in cash to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant Siri violated users' privacy, listening to them without their consent.iPhone owners complained that Apple routinely recorded their private conversations after they activated Siri unintentionally, and disclosed these conversations to third parties such as advertisers. A preliminary settlement was filed on Tuesday night in the Oakland, California, federal court, and requires approval by US district judge Jeffrey White. Continue reading...
Reduced European subsidies, a US shift to lower-priced hybrids and Chinese competition have squeezed EV makerTesla reported its first decline in annual deliveries on Thursday, as the automaker handed over fewer-than-expected electric vehicles in the fourth quarter and incentives failed to boost demand for its ageing lineup of models. The company failed to meet quarterly delivery targets multiple times in 2024.Deliveries for 2024 were 1.79m, 1.1% lower than a year ago, below estimates of 1.806m units, according to 19 analysts polled by LSEG. Tesla moved 495,570 vehicles in the three months to 31 December, missing estimates of 503,269 units, according to 15 analysts polled by LSEG. Tesla delivered 471,930 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles and 23,640 units of other models, including the Model S sedan, Cybertruck and Model X premium SUV. It produced 459,445 vehicles during the October-December period. Continue reading...
by Kiran Stacey Political correspondent on (#6T9GB)
Billionaire ally of Donald Trump also accuses Keir Starmer on X of failing to prosecute child rapists in OldhamElon Musk has caused anger by calling for the release of Tommy Robinson and accusing Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute child rapists in Oldham in Greater Manchester.The billionaire ally of Donald Trump pinned a message at the top of his X feed overnight saying Free Tommy Robinson!", tagging the far-right activist who is in jail for contempt of court. Continue reading...
Motion-sensor software sent alerts to prevent lighting up at most vulnerable moments for those trying to quitSmartwatches could be used to help people quit smoking, a study suggests.Researchers have developed pioneering motion sensor software that can detect the typical hand movements that occur when someone is holding a cigarette. Continue reading...
Company's share price has risen twentyfold after it changed its strategy to become first bitcoin treasury company'In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic upended economies around the world, an obscure US software firm decided to diversify. MicroStrategy, whose head office is situated next to a shopping mall and metro station in Tysons Corner, Virginia, had decided the steady business of software as a service" was not racy enough.Instead, it would branch out by investing up to $250m in alternative assets - stocks, bonds, commodities such as gold, digital assets such as bitcoin or other asset types". Continue reading...
While we certainly don't encourage people to turn away from the news, we also know it's important to take breaksDoomscrolling happens to the best of us. Algorithms across social platforms are finely tuned to feed you content and posts that keep you locked in. It can be hard to pull yourself away even when you're consuming a barrage of news about the state of the world online.While we certainly don't encourage people to turn away from the news, we also know it's important to take breaks. A recent MIT study found that social media can create a negative feedback loop: those who are already struggling with their mental health are more likely to consume negative content, which makes their mental health worse. Continue reading...
Tech selloffs not only cost tax revenue and jobs, but are turning the UK into a vassal stateThere is much to admire about the US. The great French social observer Alexis de Tocqueville, nearly 200 years ago, lauded its commitment to civic virtue, individual self-improvement and hard work - legacies of its puritan founders.Those traits are still evident today, but alongside them a darker one has emerged. The US, the hegemon of the 20th century still committed to democracy, has changed. It has transmuted into an imperial power careless of democracy but ever readier to exact economic tribute from its vassal states. Continue reading...
by Simon Tisdall, Max Olesker, Toby Helm, Vanessa Tho on (#6T72W)
The new US president will almost certainly bring unpredictability but several themes will dominate the year ahead. Observer writers offer their guide on what lies ahead in politics, film, fashion, sport and moreThe only thing that can be predicted with absolute certainty about Donald Trump's second term as US president is that it will be unpredictable. Trump does not really know what he wants to do on a range of issues. He talks a good game, which is how he got re-elected. But he often seems to decide policy on the basis of what the last person he spoke to told him. Is he serious about mobilising the military to carry out mass deportations of illegal" migrants? Will he use the justice department to hunt down political enemies and media critics? Will he impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports and trigger aglobal trade war? Or will he act with greater circumspection, using these threats as bargaining tools? Who knows? Hedoesn't yet. Continue reading...
Checking my emails at every possible opportunity had become distracting and draining. So I set myself new boundariesAs a freelance writer, the structure of my work day can often vary wildly. Sometimes, it feels as if I have too much to do - other days, too little.Yet no matter the shape of my 9to 5, one thing remains constant: emails. I receive about 100 a day, ranging from the inane (Tesco Clubcard updates) to the infuriating (the PR who keeps sending me the fluctuating numbers of Taylor Swift's Instagram following) and the important (editors, often wondering when the piece they have asked me to write mightmaterialise). Continue reading...
My anxiety about not replying to everyone's messages was at a constant simmer until I created proper boundariesI feel as if I've lost days of my life to digital causes. Even though I'm an extrovert, the near-constant drip of WhatsApp communications can drain me; my anxiety over not replying instantly to everyone is at constant simmer. Add to that the element of performance, and the worry that proving you care is measured in the messages you send ... and it can all get too much.Where has Remona gone?" panicked one friend, when I went awol while juggling a deadline, babysitting, and hosting house guests. The pile-up of 248 unread messages in one group alone - inclusive of podcast-length voice notes - made me feel like a bad person for being absent. Sometimes, I'm happy to be entirely mute - as I was in one unnecessarily large group I was added to without consent. I went unnoticed for years amid unsolicited selfies of people I barely knew and forwarded messages that had to be forwarded further or you'd face some disaster, until someone realised I was lurking and outed me in front of all 43 members. I was mortified. Continue reading...
After one too many moany voicenotes and streams of incessant notifications, I knew something had to changeThough my internal age is set to about 28, the time when I feel profoundly 43 is when I get nostalgic for things rendered obsolete by technology. One of those things was being able to go on holiday without being continually contacted, because the price of sending a text message was the same as a glass of wine. WhatsApp has obliterated that.Over the past year, I've noticed how much harder it has been to switch off as a result of the incessant flow of information. I have walked in the Polish countryside foraging for mushrooms under a crisp blue sky, while listening to a friend's voice note about their work worries in minute detail. After I spent a glorious day out with my 10-year-old niece in Barcelona, eating dumplings and buying stickers, a friend decided to share a non-urgent but emotionally difficult update about a mutual friend's bad health. While I was in the Maldives, after I had watched a stingray glide below me in a cobalt-blue ocean, a cousin sent me a rundown of a date where the guy had sneezed all over her food.Poorna Bell is a freelance journalist and author of Chase the RainbowDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
by Amy Hawkins Senior China correspondent on (#6T54C)
The 76-year-old is part of a trend of silver influencers' whose success in the face of adversity resonates strongly. Could she be Elon's secret weapon in China?Maye Musk is a busy woman. As well as being the mother of the world's richest man, she has been jetting between various glamorous events - many of them in China. In December alone, she attended a gala dinner in Hangzhou, walked the red carpet for a cosmetics company in Wuhan and signed copies of the Chinese edition of her book, A Woman Makes a Plan, which she described as a bestseller" in China.In fact, the only Musk-related book on the Chinese bestseller lists in October was a biography of her son Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Elon Musk is popular in China, and is thought to have the potential to wield pro-Beijing influence in the otherwise hawkish incoming administration of Donald Trump. But he has also faced scrutiny for his links to the US Department of Defense via his aerospace company, SpaceX. Continue reading...
A timeline of events in the year of Elon Musk shows how omnipresent he has become, how his X feed has become as unavoidable as Donald Trump's wasHello, and welcome to Techscape. I've been pondering screen-time and isolation after I suffered through a recent bout of Covid. Even a few days of seclusion coupled with lengthy, uninterrupted spates of staring at screens were enough to return me to the state of mind in which I spent most of 2020. I hope all of you reading have a wonderful winter and new year, filled with the opposite of that experience: family, friends, and cheery, in-person parties.Today in Techscape: We look back at the biggest tech story of 2024, Elon Musk, and at the Amazon workers strike in the US. Continue reading...
Female athlete power on social media became ever more strident in 2024 - but the backlash also damaged careers and wellbeingLina Nielsen remembers the moment she had the idea. She was sitting around the Olympic Village in Paris with her sprinting teammates - and she was bored. I said to Yemi Mary John: I'm gonna make this TikTok'," Nielsen recalls. She took herself to her bedroom, got out the flip phone each athlete had been given and typed into an Excel spreadsheet: Where you at? Holla at me."Her five-second spoof of Kelly Rowland's music-video texting fail took hardly longer than that to make. It also got 8m views. It's funny that the videos that do that best are the ones you don't put any effort in," says Nielsen with a laugh. She is still trying to make sense of the fact that her TikTok channel was the most popular of any British athlete at the Games, beating even the knit-tastic Tom Daley in second place. At the end of the Olympic fortnight her channels had been viewed by more than the Australian and German teams combined. Continue reading...
Jorge Rivera-Herrans's musical sensation Epic is just one of a series of works making a splash on the online platformWhen Jorge Rivera-Herrans released part of Epic: the Musical last Christmas, he managed to push Taylor Swift off the top of the US iTunes album charts. So there is a lot at stake when the final instalment of his musical retelling of the Odyssey is released on Christmas Day.Rivera-Herrans's project has already been an extraordinary success, with more monthly listeners on Spotify (1.6m) than veterans such as Morrissey, Liam Gallagher, or the Sex Pistols, and 119m plays on the platform in the past 28 days alone. Continue reading...
Social media firm apologises to those affected by blackout on Wednesday, after more than 100,000 complaintsMeta has said it is 99% of the way there" in solving a social media blackout with its apps, which caused issues with Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.At about 10pm GMT on Wednesday, monitoring website Downdetector said there had been 23,445 reports of Facebook outages, 11,466 for Instagram and 18,646 for WhatsApp across Britain, while in the US all three sites seemed largely unaffected. Continue reading...
The archeologist heads to Vatican City and the Egyptian Pyramids in this unconventional blockbuster, for lots of cleverly designed stealth, combat and puzzle-solving funMaking an Indiana Jones game today seems like a straightforward endeavour: you take Uncharted's Nathan Drake, send him back in time 80-odd years, give him a fedora and a bullwhip and sit back and watch the golden idols roll in. The Uncharted developer Naughty Dog perfected the template for Indy-inspired globetrotting action games more than a decade ago, and nobody would blame Swedish studio MachineGames if it stuck to it.Indiana Jones and the Great Circle opts not to. Instead, it often goes out of its way to frustrate such comparisons. This unconventional blockbuster has more in common with games such as Dishonored and Hitman than it does with Uncharted. Sure, it has action and spectacle and occasionally dabbles in platforming, but it places far greater emphasis on puzzles, open-ended stealth, and letting you beat the snot out of fascists while dressed as a priest. Continue reading...
Brain rot' is the Oxford word of the year - a fitting choice, given the startling impact the internet is having on our grey matterIf you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and type the words skibidi toilet" into YouTube. The 11-second video features an animated human head protruding from a toilet bowl while singing the nonsensical lyrics skibidi dop dop dop yes yes". The clip has been viewed more than 215m times, and spawned hundreds of millions of references on TikTok and other social media.Fitting, then, that the Oxford word of the year has just been announced as brain rot". As an abstract concept, brain rot is something we're all vaguely aware of. The dictionary defines it as the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging". But few people are aware of how literally technology is rotting our brains, and how decisively compulsive internet use is destroying our grey matter.Sian Boyle is a freelance journalist Continue reading...
About 1.4 million people have left online dating in the past year as experts say users see it as a chore rather than social activityAbout 1.4 million people in the UK have left the online dating scene in the past 12 months, but is that a sign that the apps don't work or that people are turning away from dating altogether?Ofcom's 2024 Online Nation report shows that dating app use declined significantly between 2023 and 2024, with a drop of nearly 16% in the use of the top 10 most popular dating apps this year. Continue reading...
10% of Facebook's UK workforce was axed while revenue fell slightly but pre-tax profits rose despite advertising slowdownFacebook cut more than 700 employees in the UK last year at a cost of 79m, after parent company Meta embarked on its first ever round of redundancies as part of a global cost-cutting drive to offset a disastrous collapse in revenues.The company - which is one of the most valuable US tech companies behind Apple, the Google owner Alphabet, and Amazon - also reduced its UK tax bill to just over 12% of its pre-tax profits, half the standard 25% corporation tax rate. Continue reading...
The mobile phones we loved then lost are honoured by an online archive which reveals history of bestselling brandEveryone remembers their first Nokia," says Mark Mason, who joined the telecoms company's design team back in its 1990s heyday. When you say the name, it evokes a memory."This is not as hyperbolic as it sounds - in 1998, the Finnish consumer electronics company was the bestselling phone brand in the world, with 40% of the world market and 70% of the UK market. Continue reading...
One far-right cell wanted to use 3D-printed guns to cause maximum confusion and fear' on the streets of Finland. Could the police intercept them in time?Long before he started making guns with a 3D printer, Viljam Nyman was a kid who was bullied. In a document police later found on his computer, titled The life story of how I became a far-right extremist", Nyman described his childhood in Lahti, a city in southern Finland, being picked on by other kids and feeling abandoned by the adults around him. He wrote that this experience taught him something: Be yourself' or don't care' were really bad pieces of advice. Violence and power, or the threat of using it, were actually the things that mattered. Equality and accepting difference were just words on paper, naive and idealistic fantasies. Human nature, in reality, was discriminatory and racist."In 2005, when Nyman was 11, violent protests broke out in a number of European countries after a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in response to a debate about Islam and self-censorship. Why was it, Nyman wondered, that he was mocked for being different and no one did anything about it, but criticising a religion from faraway countries was off limits? He wrote in the document that all of this" reinforced his belief that something was wrong with society and no one was on his side. Nyman became obsessed with Hitler and Nazi Germany. He began with the notion that bullies could be classified as subhuman and sent to camps, but became fascinated by the discipline and order of the Third Reich. As he got older, he immersed himself in online message boards that shared antisemitic theories. Until this point, Nyman had spent a lot of time playing video games. Now, he thought, he needed to do more so that he would not be a disgrace to the white race. He started to feel something he had not felt before: a sense of purpose. Continue reading...
by Raphael Hernandes, Lauren Aratani and Will Craft, on (#6SRWS)
FEC filings offer only a glimpse of the money tech is pouring into Washington as it seeks to influence governmentSilicon Valley poured more than $394.1m into the US presidential election this year, according to a Guardian analysis, the bulk of it coming from an enormous donation of about $243m Elon Musk made to Donald Trump's campaign.The analysis of new election data from the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows the increasingly heavy influence of the tech industry in US elections. Advocates of cryptocurrency were particularly active in this election as they fought to stave off regulation, pumping money into the presidential campaigns and key congressional races.$242.6m from Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) who has an estimated net worth of $350bn.$5.5m from Marc Andreessen, the billionaire founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. Andreessen's co-founder, Ben Horowitz, initially supported Trump but flipped to Harris.$5.1m from Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp who made the bulk of his fortune when Facebook acquired the messaging app in 2014 for $19bn.$51.1m from the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who left the social media company in 2008 to start the workflow software company Asana.$17m from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn.$11.7m from Chris Larsen, the billionaire chair of Ripple, a cryptocurrency company. Continue reading...
by Ben Quinn, Dan Milmo and Kiran Stacey on (#6SRT7)
The billionaire, having helped Trump regain the White House, is reportedly turning his interest to BritainElon Musk appears to have many obsessions. The world's richest man is evangelical about electric vehicles, space travel and Donald Trump. Another of his interests may yet have profound consequences for the UK: British politics.The billionaire is reported to be thinking of becoming the biggest donor in history with a rumoured 80m payment to Nigel's Farage's Reform UK party. Continue reading...
Decision is latest twist in a years-long battle between the social media company and the US governmentTikTok is one step closer to facing a ban in the US. A federal appeals court ruled on Friday to uphold a law that forces the hugely popular social media company to sell its assets to a non-Chinese company or be barred from the country entirely. The decision is the latest twist in a years-long battle between the US government and TikTok, which is owned by Chinese-based ByteDance.ByteDance has until 19 January to sell the app or face the ban. Continue reading...
Name was mistakenly flagged and prevented from appearing in responses, says chatbot's developerLast weekend the name was all over the internet - just not on ChatGPT.David Mayer became famous for a moment on social media because the popular chatbot appeared to want nothing to do with him. Continue reading...
Report by committee of experts also calls for doctors to ask about screen time during checkupsSmartphones sold in Spain should carry a label warning users about their potential health impacts, experts have told the Spanish government, in a report that calls for doctors to ask about screen time during checkups.As Spain pushes forward with a draft law to limit children's exposure to technology, the 50-member committee of experts has also called for minors to have limited exposure to digital devices until they are 13 to mitigate what they see as a public health problem. Continue reading...
Have a plan, know what you want and do the safety checks ... and be prepared to get up earlyBuying preloved often requires more thought and preparation than buying new, so make time to find the perfect gift. Monica Marriott-Mills, who publishes on TikTok about secondhand style, starts by making a list for each person she needs to buy for. Continue reading...
Biden administration broadens limits on Chinese access to advanced microchip technology, with Donald Trump expected to go even furtherThe US has announced new export restrictions targeting China's ability to make advanced semiconductors, drawing swift condemnation from Beijing.Washington is expanding efforts to curb exports of state-of-the-art chips to China that can be used in advanced weapons systems and in artificial intelligence. Continue reading...
Moves made to prepare country for utility outages as malicious technological threats intensifyThe Swedish government checklist for surviving a war would not have looked out of place decades ago: bottled water; sleeping bags; extra batteries; enough cash for a week; and non-perishable food such as rice and cereal.Without being mentioned in name, Russia once more lurks in the background as it did during the cold war. But the nature of the threat it poses in the pamphlet, called In case of crisis or war", has changed. Continue reading...
Kathaleen McCormick in Delaware rules Musk not entitled to vast sum despite Tesla shareholders voting to reinstate itA judge ruled on Monday that Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is still not entitled to receive a $56bn compensation package even though shareholders of the electric vehicle company had voted to reinstate it six months ago.The ruling by the Delaware judge, Kathaleen McCormick of the court of chancery, follows her January decision that called the pay package excessive and rescinded it, surprising investors. The decision cast uncertainty over Musk's future at the world's most valuable carmaker. Tesla's board argued the enormous payment scheme was necessary to keep Musk involved in the company, an argument that the billionaire, already the world's richest man, echoed. Continue reading...
David Zinsner and Michelle Johnson Holthaus named interim co-CEOs of company fighting to keep up with rivalsThe Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has retired, with David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus named as interim co-CEOs. Though demand for semiconductor chips has never been higher or more lucrative, Intel has struggled to match the success of its rivals.Gelsinger, whose career has spanned more than 40 years, also stepped down from the company's board. He started at Intel in 1979 at Intel and was its first chief technology officer. He returned to Intel as chief executive in 2021. Intel said on Monday that it would conduct a search for a new CEO. Continue reading...
For her first major solo show in Australia, the Guangzhou-born artist has turned the Art Gallery of New South Wales into a bustling cityscapeWhen the Chinese contemporary artist Cao Fei was negotiating her solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales' modern art wing, Naala Badu, she was adamant it would not be a traditional low-lit in a white square box" endeavour.The Guangzhou-born artist, who has strong ties to Sydney (a sister city to the sprawling Chinese port city), wanted her show to capture the brashness and bustle of a busy mall or market. Continue reading...
The government is determined to work with the car industry to increase take-up, boost jobs and hit emissions targets Cheaper loans on table to drive UK motorists to electric, plus cuts in EV fines for firmsThe push to electric vehicles is not about a culture war. It is a simple choice. Do we set UK industry up to take advantage of the changes that are coming? Or do we sit it out, allowing our competitors to lap us while we decide whether to change our tyres or not?The previous government, including the current leader of the opposition, might have been content to play politics with people's jobs by delaying the deadline for ending the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. But this government is not. Continue reading...
Studies in which ChatGPT outperformed scientists and GPs raise troubling questions for the future of professional workAI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking - and thinking - about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs.Gods", in this sense, would be super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously". In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI's Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the human replacement use cases". They require gigantic models and stupendous amounts of compute", water and electricity (not to mention the associated CO emissions). Continue reading...
The Dutch policy director and former MEP on the unprecedented reach of big tech, the need for confident governments, and why the election of Trump changes everythingMarietje Schaake is a former Dutch member of the European parliament. She is now the international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Her new book is entitled The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley.In terms of power and political influence, what are the main differences between big tech and previous incarnations of big business?
I stumbled on a profile with my picture as the photo. What was this man doing with my identity? I set out to track him down ...It was around 1am when I discovered my impostor was watching me. I was sitting up in bed, scrolling on my phone through the list of people who had viewed my Instagram story. The audience was the same as it always was: friends, family and a smattering of followers I had picked up over the years. But a tug from my subconscious told me, this time, something was wrong. I scrolled back up and there it was: an account I had never seen before. Their profile photo was a selfie I had taken in a bookshop basement years ago.Have you ever walked by an unexpected mirror and jumped at your own reflection? That's how it felt as I stared back at myself, unnerved by my sudden appearance. Continue reading...
Screenshots purporting to be from systems of Liverpool NHS health facility have been posted on dark webA ransomware gang claims to have stolen data from the Alder Hey children's hospital in Liverpool, allegedly including patient records.The INC Ransom group said it had published screenshots of data on the dark web that contained the personal information of patients, donations from benefactors and procurement information. Continue reading...
We recommended them in the Filter; now we've sifted through all the offers to find the genuinely good discounts on our favourite products - updated for Black FridayWe're finally approaching the business end of Black Friday, and stores have stumped up some delectable discounts on products we've recommended in the Filter.If you followed our advice in our guide to not getting ripped off in the sales, you may have waited until now to splurge on Black Friday deals, and might even be clutching a strict shopping list. Now's your time to dive in. The big day itself may be on 29 November, but the discounting continues through to Cyber Monday (2 December). Continue reading...
Studies suggest children are having their self-esteem harmed by filters that ape the effects of cosmetic surgeryJust one click on the glossy babe" filter and the teenager's face was subtly elongated, her nose made neater and a dusting of freckles sprinkled across her cheeks. Next, a glow makeup" filter erased skin blemishes, puffed her lips into a rosebud and extended her eyelashes far beyond what makeup could achieve. With a third click her face was back to reality.Hundreds of millions of people now use beauty filters to alter their appearance on apps including Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. This week TikTok announced new worldwide restrictions on children's access to those that ape the effects of cosmetic surgery. Continue reading...
The electric car brand was once a liberal favourite - but the CEO's embrace of Trump has led to an angry backlashAs Elon Musk has embraced Donald Trump and various far-right conspiracy theories, he has left behind an aghast cohort of Tesla owners who suddenly feel embarrassed by their own cars. Many of them are now publicly displaying their dismay at Musk on their vehicles.Sales of anti-Musk stickers have boomed since the world's richest man declared his support for Trump and helped propel him to victory in the US presidential election, as owners of Teslas, the car brand headed by Musk, try to distance themselves from the South African-born multibillionaire. Continue reading...
Tech billionaire tapped by Trump posts on X about wanting to eliminate Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)Elon Musk has said he wants to delete" the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal watchdog that helps protect consumers from predatory financial practices.The tech billionaire, who has been tapped to run a Department of Government Efficiency" in the incoming Donald Trump administration, posted Delete CFPB" on X, the social media site he owns. He added a declaration that the agency, which employs 1,700 people and has an annual budget of close to $700m, is an example of too many duplicative regulatory agencies" in Washington. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier and Hollie Richardso on (#6SJ82)
The podcast studio behind the Rest Is ... universe goes deep on the 1953 Iran coup in The Rest Is Classified. Plus: five of the best expert advice podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThe Rest Is Classified
Miku is a Vocaloid' - a holographic avatar that represents a digital bank of vocal samples - and performs sellout tours for thousands of very real mega-fans
Technology | The Guardian