Technology | The Guardian

A heavily criticised investment in OneWeb could bring the government a first bite at the lucrative satellite internet marketThey are invisible to the naked eye, but can leave a streak of light across an astronomer’s telescope. Above our heads, the constellation of small satellites orbiting the Earth is expanding every month. Often no bigger than a fridge, they are part of a new space race as rivals compete to beam broadband internet to the hardest-to-reach places on Earth.The frontrunners are Starlink, backed by US tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, and OneWeb, which is part- owned by the British taxpayer. The latter’s plan to build a network of 650 satellites is a centrepiece of the UK’s space strategy, unveiled in September. Continue reading...

Philippines journalist Maria Ressa says social media firm is threat to democracy and failing to halt spread of misinformationThe campaigning Philippines journalist Maria Ressa, who was last week awarded the Nobel peace prize, has launched a stinging attack on Facebook, accusing the social media firm of being a threat to democracy that was “biased against facts” and failed to prevent the spread of disinformation.She said its algorithms “prioritise the spread of lies laced with anger and hate over facts”. Continue reading...

If you think ending the supply chain crisis will be hard, pity the poor players of this popular job simulation game, who have to deal with angry customers, mean relatives and weird physicsThe fuel crisis has brought the rigours of one particular profession into sharp focus this month. Petrol station managers throughout Britain have had to cope with snaking queues, angry customers and even forecourt fist fights, as the shortage of HGV drivers took its toll. It’s a career many of us probably hadn’t thought much about before this troubling new subplot in the ongoing Brexit/Covid drama, but has now become a countrywide concern. For those who want to know more, there’s a game for that.Fortuitously released just a few weeks before the crisis, and currently one of the most streamed games on Twitch, Gas Station Simulator has you taking over a dilapidated fuel stop just off Route 66 in the middle of the desert. OK, so it’s hardly a BP garage on the North Circular, but the basics are similar. First you need to clear the place up – unboard the windows, fix the electrics and throw away a lot of junk (which is extremely satisfying) – but then you’re down to the real business: filling tanks, serving customers at the till and ordering in petrol and snack deliveries. Continue reading...

Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, joined a growing list of Silicon Valley former employees to call out company policiesWhen Frances Haugen revealed she was the Facebook whistleblower who supplied internal documents to Congress and the Wall Street Journal, she joined a growing list of current and former Silicon Valley employees who’ve come forward to call out military contracts, racism, sexism, contributions to climate crisis, pay disparities and more in the industry.In the past days, the Guardian spoke with five former employees of Amazon, Google, and Pinterest who’ve spoken out about their companies’ policies. The conversations revealed Haugen’s experience has been singular in some respects. Few of them received the international praise bestowed upon her. Some of them said they have faced termination, retaliation, harassment and prolonged litigation. Continue reading...

Covid misinformation remains on site for months adding to concern over impact of social media on young peopleLies and conspiracy theories about Covid-19, which have amassed millions of views and are accessible to young children, have been available on the social media platform TikTok for months.TikTok accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers that discourage vaccination and peddle myths about Covid survival rates were uncovered by NewsGuard, an organisation that monitors online misinformation. Continue reading...

Israeli maker of surveillance software blocked +44 code after detecting hack against Princess Haya, source saysThe powerful spyware used to hack into mobile phones belonging to Princess Haya and her divorce lawyer Fiona Shackleton is no longer effective against UK numbers, sources familiar with the software’s developer have said.NSO Group, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus surveillance tool, implemented a change preventing client countries from targeting +44 numbers, the sources said, after it became aware of the British hacking scandal on 5 August last year. Continue reading...

With its larger, brighter display and array of useful updates, this sleek new version of the Switch is expensive but desirableI will be for ever grateful to the Nintendo Switch for saving my sanity during the two most trying periods of my life: my first year of parenthood, during which I learned to breastfeed lying down so that I could sneak extra hours of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule; and basically all of 2020, during which I was dealing with a pandemic, a six-month-old baby and a three-year-old, and Animal Crossing was the only thing that kept me from losing my entire mind.After four and a half years, though, the brilliant hybrid on-the-go-and-living-room console is getting long in the tooth. The Switch Lite, released in September 2019, wasn’t so much an upgrade as a stripped-down redesign: lighter, simpler, made for playing on the bus or in bed. And it lacked the Switch’s two most elegant features: you couldn’t play it on a TV, and you couldn’t snap off a controller to hand to a friend for a pub round of Mario Kart. Continue reading...

According to leaked research, the firm has found engagement among a key demographic is in declineOliver Coghlan embodies Facebook’s problems with teen and young adult audiences – a growing number of them do not like it. The 23-year-old says he stopped using Facebook regularly three years ago and he is considering deleting the app. His sole use for it now is to check people’s birthdays.“I haven’t deleted it yet but I might do soon – I really don’t like the company’s monopolistic behaviour,” said Coghlan, a British student based in the Netherlands. He added that the EU referendum and the 2016 US presidential election, and the online anger that accompanied those polls, convinced him that he wanted to spend less time on Facebook’s main platform. Continue reading...

We must demand that Facebook tell the full, unvarnished truth. Fortunately for us, the public, the truth tends to come through despite Facebook officials’ best efforts to obscure itImagine what it’s like to work at Facebook this week. For about five years much of the world has slowly turned against the service that once promised to connect the world and spread democracy and cookies and puppies and such. But this week, in the wake of revelations of serious malfeasance and moral irresponsibility by Facebook’s leaders, it must be unbearable to face friends and family, even distant Facebook friends.In recent days, Frances Haugen, a former member of Facebook’s “civic integrity team”, has launched a deft and professional public assault on the company. Unlike previous Facebook whistleblowers, like former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, Haugen managed to capture the interest and attention of policy leaders and journalists around the world. We have to ask why Haugen has had so much traction and impact when Zhang, who was fired for raising objections within the company to Facebook’s human rights problems, did not.Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy Continue reading...

Silenced No More Act makes it illegal for firms to prevent employees from speaking out about harassment or discriminationIn an important victory for Silicon Valley activists and California workers, the governor has signed a law making it illegal for companies to bar employees from speaking out about harassment and discrimination.The new law is the result of hard-fought advocacy work by those in the tech industry who have long spoken out against the restrictive confidentiality arrangements, known as nondisclosure agreements or NDAs, which are intended to protect industry secrets but have also created a culture of silence around wrongdoing. Continue reading...

The Economist’s correspondents offer expert analysis in To a Lesser Degree. Plus: how a 90s boyband disappeared, and an enlightening, enraging look at Anita Hill’s landmark testimonyTo a Lesser Degree

As high-end fashion conglomerates rush to invest in virtual reality fashion, small players are making moves tooIn the designer Denni Francisco’s new film, models wearing clothes from her label Ngali wander through a virtual landscape. Using this digital medium, it was possible to take her collection on location, despite being in lockdown and unable to travel.This was particularly important for Francisco, a Wiradjuri woman, as the landscape used in the film is based on Taungurung Country, in central Victoria, where Francisco was born, and her daughter now lives. She says when she’s designing, connection to Country is at the forefront of her mind. “We’re often talking about how what we do belongs to Country, how it’s connected to Country and how it has a rightful place in Country,” she says.

Users urged to ‘look out for each other’ and ‘remember the human’ as platform tries to limit abuseTwitter users poised to dive into a heated online debate will be warned they are about to enter an “intense” conversation, under a safety trial.The social media platform is testing a feature that drops a notice under a potentially contentious exchange, stating: “Heads up. Conversations like this can be intense.” Another prompt, which appears to be aimed at people making a reply, goes to greater lengths to calm down users and urges the tweeter to “look out for each other”, “remember the human” and note that “diverse perspectives have value”. Continue reading...

Super-slick screen, better cameras with 3x optical zoom, good battery and speed make it tough to beatThe iPhone 13 Pro is a solid upgrade on last year’s model with a faster and slicker screen, a better camera with 3x optical zoom, longer battery life and a small price cut.Apple’s latest Pro smartphone costs £949 ($799/A$1,349), which is £50 cheaper than its predecessor but still near the top of the market. It sits between the standard £779 iPhone 13 and the £1,049 iPhone 13 Pro Max.Screen: 6.1in Super Retina XDR with ProMotion (120Hz OLED) (460ppi)Processor: Apple A15 BionicRAM: 6GBStorage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TBOperating system: iOS 15Camera: Triple 12MP rear cameras with OIS, 12MP front-facing cameraConnectivity: 5G, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5, Lightning, ultra wideband and locationWater resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins)Dimensions: 146.7mm x 71.5mm x 7.7mmWeight: 204g Continue reading...

This film exploring the ideas of Dr Phil Kennedy, who had an electrode implanted in his brain, throws up interesting prospects for the human futureDr Phil Kennedy is regarded by many as the Indiana Jones of neuroscience: a Limerick-born doctor who became a bioengineering trailblazer, making people excited – and then nervous – by the way he worked outside the system. Then finally, sensationally, he experimented on himself by having an electrode implanted inside his brain in a Belize clinic that specialises in medical tourism.Kennedy did this to measure the ways in which brainwaves can be harnessed to external computing capacity, helping people with locked-in syndrome or ALS, for example, although what was specifically achieved by implant surgery on himself isn’t clear. This brief documentary is a partial introduction to the man and his work and it seeks to rescue Kennedy from his wacky reputation, to downplay the maverick side of his personality (there is no mention of his self-published sci-fi novel called 2051) and it doesn’t dwell on the fact that Kennedy is now regarded as somewhat eccentric by mainstream neuroscientists – although disruptors, pioneers and original thinkers are very often people just like him. Continue reading...

Court judgments reveal how Sheikh Mohammed’s use of Pegasus spyware against his ex-wife was uncovered

Instant messaging app experiences one-day surge in signups and tops the US iPhone download chartThe instant messaging app Telegram registered 70 million new users during Monday’s Facebook blackout, its Russian founder said, as people around the world flocked to the encrypted service.“The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day,” Pavel Durov wrote on his Telegram channel. Continue reading...

When Chris Stedman’s friend Alex took his own life, he left him a final puzzle to solve. Unread charts Stedman’s journey down a rabbit hole of grief and realisation“When someone dies, there are always questions that will be left unanswered. But what happens when you lose someone and they leave you a trail to follow after they are gone?”Chris Stedman is explaining the central conceit of his podcast Unread. The four-part series sees the writer and podcaster memorialise his friend Alex, who took his own life in late 2019, via narration, voice notes and testimonies from mutual friends. It also follows Stedman’s quest to better understand his friend’s life, digging into parts of his history that he didn’t know existed. Bringing together an affecting story and a compelling mystery, Unread garnered critical acclaim from the likes of Vulture, and has been among the podcast highlights of the year since its release in July. Continue reading...

Outlet at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent is retailer’s first 4-star shop outside USAmazon is bolstering its UK high street presence with the opening of its first non-food physical shop offering its bestselling lines of books, electronics, toys, games and homeware.The outlet, at the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, is the online retailer’s first Amazon 4-star store outside the US and will use data from its website sales to judge which products are proving popular with local shoppers. Continue reading...

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said the initiative could save 1m tonnes of carbon dioxide a yearGoogle Maps is to offer drivers the lowest carbon route for their chosen journey as part of the search company’s new environmentally friendly policies.Motorists will be able to select the route with the lowest carbon emissions once factors such as traffic and road inclines are taken into account. The new product launches in the US on Wednesday and in Europe next year. Where the comparable journey times are broadly the same, Google Maps will default to the lowest carbon option. Continue reading...

Ofcom threatens severe financial penalties for sites such as OnlyFans and video apps including TikTokUK websites and apps that host pornography and adult material – such as OnlyFans and PocketStars – must put in place strict age-verification processes or face severe financial penalties, the communications watchdog has said.Video-sharing platforms (VSPs) established in the UK – including TikTok, Snapchat, Vimeo and Twitch – face fines of £250,000 or 5% of applicable turnover, whichever is greater, for breaches of regulations, fresh guidance from Ofcom states.Have clear, visible terms and conditions which prohibit uploading content relating to terrorism, child sexual abuse material or racism and enforce them effectively.Implement tools that allow users to flag harmful videos easily. They should signpost how quickly they will respond, and be open about any action taken.Restrict access to adult sites. VSPs that host pornographic material should have robust age verification in place, to protect under-18s from accessing such material. Continue reading...

Frances Haugen, the former employee who accused Facebook of putting profit over safety, has testified before the US Senate. The whistleblower condemned the extreme secrecy and lack of transparency around Facebook and how its algorithms work. 'I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,' she said. 'The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.'

Three people tell how they were affected by the temporary loss of the site, and WhatsApp and Instagram

UK driver alleges his account was illegally deactivated when Uber software decided he was not who he said he wasAn Uber driver who lost his job when automated face-scanning software failed to recognise him is accusing the firm of indirect race discrimination in a legal test case.The black driver, who worked on the Uber platform from 2016 until April 2021, has filed an employment tribunal claim alleging his account was illegally deactivated when facial-verification software used to log drivers on to the ride-hailing app decided he wasn’t who he said he was. Continue reading...

Trump has handled his social media exile with all the grace one would expect – and now he’s pathetically grovelling for the chance to tweetDid you get a bit antsy on Monday when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down? Did you feel the terrible tremors of an addict forced to go cold turkey? If so then please spare a thought for how torturous this year has been for poor old Donald Trump. The 75-year-old social media junkie has been banned from all his favourite platforms since January, when he was accused of inciting and applauding a violent insurrection. Different sites handed out different punishments: Trump was put in Facebook jail for at least two years with a chance of parole; Twitter, on the other hand, has said there isn’t a hope in hell he’s getting his account back. Not even if he becomes president again.Trump has handled his social media exile with all the grace one would expect from him. And, to be fair, I can understand why the belligerent billionaire is confused by the fact that he has been told he is not allowed to do something. How could it be possible, after all, that a rich white man be banned from doing anything, let alone something he enjoys? It goes against all the rules of nature! Well, you’ll be glad to know that Trump is on a mission to right all that and make his social media life great again. On Friday, the former president begged a federal judge in Florida to grant an injunction that would make the losers and haters at Twitter reinstate his @realDonaldTrump account while he fights the company’s permanent ban. This guy used to be the most powerful man in the world; now he’s pathetically grovelling for a chance to tweet. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t also a sobering reminder of the immense power big tech has.Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Frances Haugen filed at least eight complaints against the company regarding its approach to safetyThe Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who testifies at the US Congress on Tuesday, has filed at least eight complaints with the US financial watchdog accusing the social media company of serially misleading investors about its approach to safety and the size of its audience.The complaints, published online by the news programme 60 Minutes late on Monday, hours before Haugen’s testimony to US senators at 10am EDT (3pm BST), are based on tens of thousands of internal documents that Haugen copied shortly before she quit Facebook in May.The company’s approach to hate speech.Its approach to teenage mental health.Its monitoring of human trafficking.How the company’s algorithms promoted hate speech.Preferential disciplinary treatment for VIP users.Promoting ethnic violence.Failing to inform investors about a shrinking user base in certain demographics. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsI imagine that a couple of hundred years ago the idea of recording and playing back audio or video was as ridiculous as the idea seems now of recording and playing back odours. So why have we made so much progress at the first but none at the second? Peter Keyston, Newton BlossomvillePost your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published on Sunday.

In the past month the social media empire has faced headaches ranging from accusations of putting profit over public good, to calls for it to be broken up

Billions of users were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for hours while the social media giant scrambled to restore servicesFacebook and its other platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, went down globally for close to six hours on Monday and Tuesday, depending on your time zone. As services are being restored, questions are being asked about what caused the outage, and why it took so long to fix. Continue reading...

Frances Haugen, who came forward accusing the company of putting profit over safety, will testify in Washington on TuesdayA former Facebook employee who has accused the company of putting profit over safety will take her damning accusations to Washington on Tuesday when she testifies to US senators.Frances Haugen, 37, came forward on Sunday as the whistleblower behind a series of damaging reports in the Wall Street Journal that have heaped further political pressure on the tech giant. Haugen told the news program 60 Minutes that Facebook’s priority was making money over doing what was good for the public. Continue reading...

Users in UK, US, Australia and other countries found services inaccessible, prompting company apologyFacebook experienced one of the worst outages in its history on Monday, leaving users around the world unable to access its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, for several hours.By late on Monday, the services were slowly coming back online, with the company apologizing for the extended disruption. Continue reading...

The company and its network of services were hit by an outage in several countries, affecting millions of people

Internal papers show firm is lying about making progress against hate, violence and misinformation, ex-employee saysA former Facebook employee has accused the company of putting profit over the public good, after coming forward as the whistleblower who leaked a cache of internal documents that have placed the tech firm in its worst crisis since the Cambridge Analytica scandal.Frances Haugen, 37, said the thousands of documents she had collected and shared with the Wall Street Journal and US law enforcement showed the company was lying to the public that it was making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation. Continue reading...

Former employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 MinutesA whistleblower at Facebook will say that thousands of pages of internal company research she turned over to federal regulators proves the social media giant is deceptively claiming effectiveness in its efforts to eradicate hate and misinformation and it contributed to the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.The former employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes ahead of a scheduled appearance at a Senate hearing on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Max Chafkin’s thorough study of the tech titan reveals a man with his eye on the main chance, rather than a visionaryThis is a book about the aphrodisiac effect of wealth and in particular about the reality distortion field that surrounds people who possess it. Peter Thiel is such a person and the strength of the field that surrounds him is so intense that it is difficult to believe anything that anyone writes about him.So you approach journalist Max Chafkin’s book with a degree of scepticism. Has he succeeded in penetrating the hype of the “Thielverse” and drilled down to the heart of the riddle wrapped around an enigma that is Thiel? The answer is: perhaps. And if he has succeeded, then the conclusion is that Thiel is nothing like as interesting as the media (and the political world) seem to think. He’s just a very rich and very strange human being. Continue reading...

From fast food to farming, Covid-19 has accelerated the rise of the worker robots. This in turn will put more jobs at risk and makes the need to reframe society ever more urgentAs the coronavirus pandemic enveloped the world last year, businesses increasingly turned to automation in order to address rapidly changing conditions. Floor-cleaning and microbe-zapping disinfecting robots were introduced in hospitals, supermarkets and other environments. Some enterprises found that, given the new emphasis on hygiene and social distancing, robotic operations offered a marketing advantage. The American fast food chain White Castle began using hamburger-cooking robots in an effort to create “an avenue for reduced human contact with food during the cooking process”.With the worst days of the pandemic hopefully now behind us, the jobs story has turned out to be unexpectedly complicated. While overall unemployment rates remain elevated, both the US and the UK are experiencing widespread worker shortages, focused especially in those occupations that tend to offer gruelling work conditions and relatively low pay. Even as a quarter of a million of British workers who held jobs in 2019 remain unemployed, job vacancies are up 20% from pre-pandemic levels as employers struggle to fill many positions. The reasons behind the worker shortages are not entirely clear. A common assumption is that extended payments to furloughed workers allowed people to remain out of the workforce. However, evidence from a number of US states that moved to discontinue unemployment benefits early suggests that the extended payments may not have played a major role. Many workers may have simply reassessed their willingness to do difficult and often unrewarding jobs in return for low pay. In the UK, Brexit has greatly exacerbated the situation. At least 200,000 EU nationals, primarily from eastern Europe, who once filled roles in areas such as agriculture, transportation and logistics, have left the country and may never return. Continue reading...

‘My daughter has this comedic flair, this sense of timing’Christopher Anderson often makes breakfast for his family (eggs, pancakes), but what caught his eye here was the light and the colour, the repetition of shapes. Blue plate, yellow circle. Of course, the pose his three-year-old daughter Pia struck just as he moved into position with his phone – well, that was all her. “You have to know her to understand,” he says. “She has this comedic flair, this sense of timing.” And that gesture – her toddler finger primly poking the yolk – lends the image its satisfyingly tactile quality. “The squishiness of the egg and the squishiness of her,” as Anderson says.Family life was the subject of Anderson’s book Son, for which he trained his lens on Pia’s brother Atlas. He never consciously set out to make one of his daughter: that was all her, too. If Pia, the book, came about at her insistence, the photos in it are also a collaboration of a novel kind. “It’s not just a collection of cute pics of my kid,” he says. “It’s an exploration of the photographer-subject relationship.” Continue reading...

As dust from the gold rush settles, big record companies and elite artists emerge firmly on topWith the streaming revolution breathing new life into a once-moribund music industry collapsing under plummeting CD sales and rampant piracy, the world’s biggest record companies – Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music – have got their financial mojo back.After facing financial ruin a decade ago, the trio, which control the vast majority of the world’s biggest hits with a roster of talent spanning Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Coldplay to the Beatles, Adele and the Korean megaband BTS, are now valued at a combined $100bn (£73.8bn) as investors bank on the titans being the biggest winners of the streaming boom. Continue reading...

Pressure grows on social network after US senators challenge Instagram over impact of app on children’s mental healthUS lawmakers have left Facebook in no doubt this week that revelations about the impact of its Instagram app on teen mental health have further damaged the company’s reputation.The Democrat senator Richard Blumenthal said the social network was “indefensibly delinquent” in its behaviour and had “chosen growth over children’s mental health”, after the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Facebook’s internal research had flagged concerns that its photo-sharing app was damaging the wellbeing of young users. Continue reading...

Journalist Jason Rezaian tells the story of his shock imprisonment in a new podcast. Plus: Storytime with Seth Rogen, and The Cut considers the changing face of sex on TV544 Days

SpaceX founder, who in April won a contract from Nasa, took a jab at Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for suing when it lost out on dealElon Musk intensified the feud over lawsuits and rocket sizes with space rival Jeff Bezos this week, kicking off the latest round in the billionaire battle over humanity’s return to the moon.The SpaceX founder, who in April won a contract from Nasa to build the next-generation spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972, took a jab at Bezos for suing the US government when his company lost out on the deal. Continue reading...

Senators highlighted research revealed in the Wall Street Journal showing how the photo app could affect girls’ body image and self-esteemAntigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, faced a grilling before the US Congress on Thursday in a hearing examining the impacts of the company’s products on children.Thursday’s hearing of the Senate commerce, science and transportation subcommittee comes after a series of Wall Street Journal reports based on internal Facebook leaks, including a story that revealed research showing the harmful effects of Instagram on childhood mental health. Continue reading...

Technology and Covid lockdowns blamed for rise in eating disorders and insomnia among the youngIt was while browsing on social media at the age of 13 that Hannah realised she had an eating disorder. Seeing other girls and women talking about their experiences, she thought: “This is me.”Since that moment, the now 17-year-old has been on a path to recovery, which includes recently relapsing during the Covid-19 pandemic. She said that after initially seeking support via her GP, it took “about a year to get help”, despite “seeing three different doctors”. Continue reading...

US Congress to question firm’s head of safety after Wall Street Journal reports revealed research on the photo appFacebook has released internal research that examines Instagram’s impact on teenagers’ mental health before a US Congress hearing on Thursday.Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, will appear in Washington on Thursday in a hearing exploring the impacts of the company’s products on young users. Continue reading...

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PlayStation 5; Kojima Productions/Sony

Exclusive: UK producer Kate Wilson hopes it will force film executives ‘to take their head out of the sand’When she was 24, the film producer Kate Wilson was sexually harassed at work so badly, she left the United States and returned to the UK, at a considerable impact to her career. “That was 21 years ago,” she said, “and I’m only just comfortable referencing it now.”The co-founder of a soon-to-be-launched app, Call It!, Wilson is determined to ensure that workplace bullying, discrimination and harassment have no place in the UK film and TV industry. Continue reading...

Regulators lack the resources to certify the safety of goods sold online by third partiesThe UK’s product safety regime is not up to the job of preventing a tragedy such as the Grenfell Tower fire as shopping moves online and regulators take on new responsibilities following Brexit, MPs have warned.A third of products are now bought on the web, yet a gap in the law means that digital giants such as Amazon and eBay are not responsible for the safety of items sold by third parties. The budgets of council-run Trading Standards services have also been cut to the bone, according to a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). Continue reading...

Analysis: After the Huawei chief’s detention, the saga rapidly turned from a narrow legal dispute into an escalating battleThe deal allowing Meng Wanzhou to return home to China nearly three years after her arrest will come as a relief to all the participants in a saga that rapidly turned from a narrow legal dispute into an escalating geopolitical battle.Related: Meng Wanzhou: US prosecutors reach deal in case of Huawei executive at center of diplomatic row Continue reading...

Lawsuit alleges settlement in Cambridge Analytica case driven by desire to protect founderFacebook paid $4.9bn more than necessary to the US Federal Trade Commission in a settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in order to protect Mark Zuckerberg, a lawsuit has claimed.The lawsuit alleges that the size of the $5bn settlement was driven by a desire to protect Facebook’s founder and chief executive from being named in the FTC complaint. Continue reading...