Now that Alexa, Siri and Google have moved in, it’s only a matter of time before some of us are left out in the cold, says Emma BeddingtonI came into the kitchen recently to find my husband cradling our electricity smart meter with the kind of tender attention more usually directed to a new-born, his phone clutched in his free hand. “You didn’t turn your office heater off last night,” he said. I didn’t like his tone.“I did! I went in this morning to turn it on again!” Continue reading...
The former Theranos CEO took the stand on Friday, marking a pivotal moment in the fraud caseGovernment prosecutors in the trial of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes ended their case on Friday, capping off 11 weeks of testimony from witnesses detailing allegations of fraud against the founder.The Theranos saga has been widely covered since cracks began to emerge in the glossy image of the blood testing startup in 2015. But the first phase of the trial revealed more startling new details. Continue reading...
The former CEO testified about the early days of setting up her company in surprise decision by her defense teamIn a surprise move, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her own defense on Friday during a fraud trial that has held Silicon Valley in its grip.The former CEO of the blood-testing company is charged with deceiving investors and customers about a supposedly revolutionary device that could perform hundreds of tests using just a drop of blood. She faces 11 counts of fraud and up to 20 years in prison. Continue reading...
Owning a classic car doesn’t make you a little Englander or a climate change denier, writes Ian AllenMartin Rowson’s insertion of a Morris Traveller into a fossil fuel nightmare scene sparked my interest (Political cartoon, 12 November). Nostalgia is a powerful thing, but it is clearly recognised that it is about the past. The ownership of a classic car of any sort is primarily about past memories, family, holidays and a love of simpler technologies.It is not emblematic of a wish to reintroduce societal inequalities or to endorse a little Englander mentality. Most owners would recognise that the use of a Minor on a high mileage basis is definitely over, and some have already adopted plug-in electric as everyday transport. I am certain that most would support an economy that had repair and viable reuse at the core. Give us a break, Martin!
Social media platform has been accused of not doing enough to curb inflammatory postsFacebook is testing a feature allowing users to control how much content they view from friends, groups and public figures, amid accusations that the social media platform is not doing enough to curb inflammatory posts.Users will be able to reduce or increase the amount of content that they see from specific categories on their news feed, a customised scroll of content from friends, pages and groups that is a central plank of users’ experience of the platform. Continue reading...
by Hollie Richardson, Hannah Verdier and Hannah J Dav on (#5S3D9)
Aminatou Sow and guests look back at the connections forged by the Princess of Wales. Plus: powerful reporting on Asian American experiences in Self Evident, and Jon Ronson returnsWhen Diana Met …
Advertising Standards Authority receives complaints about ads for meme coin named after Elon Musk’s dogThe UK advertising watchdog has launched an investigation into a London bus and underground ad campaign for Floki Inu, a “meme coin” cryptocurrency named after a dog owned by Elon Musk, as pressure rises to ban the marketing of crypto products on public transport networks.The Advertising Standards Authority launched the investigation after receiving complaints about Floki’s latest campaign. Continue reading...
Video game company faces shareholder rebellion after workers protest against the response to sexual misconduct allegationsThe embattled boss of the video game company Activision Blizzard is facing a shareholder rebellion one day after employees staged a walkout to protest about the company’s response to sexual misconduct allegations at the firm.“In contrast to past company statements, CEO Bobby Kotick was aware of many incidents of sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender discrimination at Activision Blizzard, but failed either to ensure that the executives and managers responsible were terminated or to recognize and address the systematic nature of the company’s hostile workplace culture,” a group of shareholders, led by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) Investment Group and holding a total of 4.8m shares, wrote in a letter shared on Wednesday with the Washington Post. Continue reading...
Investment bank says it lost millions because of tweets by Elon Musk that he might take electric carmaker privateJPMorgan has sued Tesla for $162.2m, accusing Elon Musk’s electric car company of “flagrantly” breaching a 2014 contract relating to stock trading options that Tesla sold to the bank.The options, or warrants, give the holder the right to buy a company’s stock at a set “strike” price and date. The suit, filed in a Manhattan federal court, centres on a dispute over how JPMorgan repriced its Tesla warrants as a result of Musk’s notorious 2018 tweet that he was considering taking the carmaker private. Continue reading...
Ohio attorney general says Facebook ‘was creating misery and divisiveness for profit’Filing suit in response to whistleblower allegations which have rocked Facebook, the attorney general of Ohio, Dave Yost, accused the social media company of “creating misery and divisiveness for profit”.Yost sued Meta – as Facebook was recently renamed – after revelations from the whistleblower Frances Haugen shocked consumers and sent stock prices tumbling. Continue reading...
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington on (#5RZR3)
Canada-based researchers say new evidence suggests Candiru’s software used to target critics of autocratic regimesResearchers have found new evidence that suggests spyware made by an Israeli company that was recently blacklisted in the US has been used to target critics of Saudi Arabia and other autocratic regimes, including some readers of a London-based news website.A report by Montreal-based researchers from Slovakian company Eset, an internet security firm, found links between attacks against high-profile websites in the Middle East and UK, and the Israeli company Candiru, which has been called Israel’s “most mysterious cyberwarfare company”. Continue reading...
Cindy Warner saw a promising career at the cloud computing company. What she found, she says, was ‘toxic’When Cindy Warner joined Amazon Web Services in February 2020, she saw it as an opportunity to increase diversity and reshape the company’s strategy. She recalls how AWS “aggressively” recruited her, offering a quick path to higher-level roles and better pay.But just over a year after she joined, the promising job had become a nightmare. Continue reading...
Parent company Meta denies data being used to target young users with ads based on their browsing activityFacebook and Instagram are gathering data from under-18s by using software that tracks users’ web browsing activity, according to research.The platforms’ parent company had announced in July that it would allow advertisers to target young users based on three categories only – age, gender and location – rather than a range of options including their personal interests. Continue reading...
Two decades on, developers for its original launch talk about creating games for Microsoft’s debut consoleTwenty years since the launch of the original Xbox, its manufacturer Microsoft remains the new kid on the block: no new competitor has entered the home games console field since. Before 2001, Sega and Nintendo were the main competitors to Sony’s ascendant PlayStation. Microsoft shoved both aside to eventually become Sony’s direct rival, and the battle for the space beneath your TV continues to this day.What separated the Xbox from other consoles of the time was not the power of its hardware or the appeal of its infamously chunky, almost brutalist design. It was the relationship between it, and the developers who made its games. The Xbox was easier to make games for than Sony’s or Nintendo’s consoles, and Microsoft went to previously unheard-of lengths to ensure that the Xbox’s launch titles were as strong as they could be. Continue reading...
Doctors have been surprised to see young adults developing tics and seizures that usually start in childhood. Social media has been blamed, but the reality is more complicatedMichelle Wacek was a TikTok fan years ago, back when the video-sharing app was called Musical.ly. “I went on it for a laugh,” she says. “And then I got sucked into the vortex.” She took part in lip-syncing challenges, and followed the influencer Evie Meg, who raises awareness about Tourette syndrome among her 14 million followers.In April 2020, Wacek was messing around in the kitchen when her husband accidentally clipped her in the face. The then 25-year-old chef had a panic attack. “It triggered a PTSD response from a previous abusive relationship I was in,” she says. Continue reading...
In a landmark US judgment, California official says the company failed to ‘adequately notify’ employees and local health agenciesAmazon has agreed to pay a $500,000 fine and be monitored by California officials after the state’s attorney general said the company failed to “adequately notify” workers and health authorities about new Covid-19 cases.Amazon employs about 150,000 people in California, most of them at 100 “fulfillment centers” – sprawling warehouses where orders are packed and shipped. The agreement, which must be approved by a judge, requires the Seattle-based retailer to notify its workers within a day of new coronavirus cases in their workplaces. Continue reading...
Disney+ has added enhanced Imax versions of a selection of Marvel adventures but does it make a shred of difference?It was not so long ago, children, that a person desiring to watch a movie at their leisure had no choice but to purchase a round, shiny object called a Digital Video Disc. The early days of DVD continued and widened a debate begun during the VHS era, in that many titles were released in both “widescreen” and “fullscreen” formats from which a discerning customer could make their own choice. The widescreen presentation would fit the theatrical projection to the average consumer TV, “letterboxing” the frame with black bars called mattes above and below to squeeze a long rectangle into a shorter one. As promised by the name, fullscreen versions instead filled the entirety of the TV by cutting off space on the left and right of a shot. This was the demonstrably inferior option – you’re missing parts of the movie, sometimes elements integral to the text – but customers kept buying. For them, the feeling of seeing more overruled the fact that they were in actuality seeing less.Fast-forward to today, and the cinematic medium now faces an odd inverse of this schism in visuals. The notion that every inch of our massive televisions should be put to active use has compelled Disney to re-release 13 of their Marvel Studios films in “Imax Expanded Aspect Ratio”, ostensibly bringing the immensity of the multiplex into the living room. In practice, this special feature of the Disney Plus streaming app unmasks the image, restoring space on the top and bottom that had previously been cropped out for ordinary theaters. The taller Imax screens allow for a width-to-height ratio of 1.90:1, as opposed to your given movie house’s anamorphic standard of 2.35:1, without the sacrifices in visibility of a fullscreen DVD. Disney wants to extend this experience to the home, where the usual high-def TV has a ratio of 16:9 (or more relevantly for comparison here, 1.77:1). As the press release on Marvel’s own web site puts it, this on-demand Imax “offers up to 26% more picture for select sequences – meaning more of the action is visible on screen, just as the film-makers intended”. Continue reading...
We are told these members-only groups are the beginnings of Web 3.0. Are they all they are hyped up to be?I have seen the light, and I was not convinced. This month, I was invited to a party hosted by Friends With Benefits, an exclusive club of artists and investors who have access to a private chatroom on Discord and parties in cities like Miami and New York. The image has a subversive sheen: techno DJs and venture capitalists in ripped designer jeans throwing secret raves. The club’s “manifesto” describes a “bright future” for the “ultimate cultural membership” where “prosperity is abundant” and “data and payments are fluid”, just like gender.Friends With Benefits was founded in 2020 by Trever McFedries who, after bringing the VR popstar Lil Miquela into the world, had higher ambitions than animating a robot to make out with Bella Hadid in an underwear commercial. “Capital as a weapon is intriguing to me,” said McFedries in a YouTube speech. Having seen Occupy “fail miserably” while GameStop “toppled a hedge fund in four days”, he set his sights on creating a DAO. Continue reading...
In the future, will we find a better way to live, or will our homes be taken over by surveillance and despotic appliances?Imagine, if you can, a small, bluish room. Wires, screens, sensors. A few keepsakes from the old world. The room’s fleshy inhabitant, confined indoors by a zoonotic pandemic, greenwashes a data-mining company from her bed. The government has made it illegal for her to step outside.There is a communal kitchen down the corridor, which she shares with a few strangers she met online, but mostly she orders her meals via an interface and eats them here. Microphones record her interactions. A motion sensor on her wrist reminds her to optimise her performance. Filled with saudade for the dying world outside, she has bought a few rainforest plants to brighten the space. Her pocket surveillance device reminds her to water them. She catches the news: the world’s richest man has just left the Earth’s atmosphere. Continue reading...
The UK automotive industry will need a large local supply of battery capacity. If it does not get it, it could shrink quicklyThe end of the internal combustion engine was one of the goals identified by Boris Johnson before Cop26.The climate summit in Glasgow has delivered in part – some manufacturers and a few big countries said last week they would end sales of fossil fuel cars by 2040. Neither Volkswagen nor Toyota, the world’s two biggest carmakers, signed up, because of concerns over electric charger availability in poorer countries, but nevertheless the path is clear. Petrol and diesel are on their way out. Battery electric cars are on the way in. Continue reading...
Companies offering remote monitoring software are booming. But spying on your employees is no way to treat peopleA year ago, while still in the grips of the pandemic, workers at many businesses – small and large – were continuing to work from home mostly due to either government or corporate mandates. Now, as the pandemic (hopefully) recedes, many workers are coming back to work but my smartest clients have learned that, to attract and retain the best people, a work-from-home option needs to be on the table.During the pandemic we were scrambling just to keep things going. But now we’re implementing policies that many feel should have supervisory controls. And many business owners, large and small, are asking themselves a question: is it time to monitor what our people are actually doing when they’re not working in the office? Continue reading...
How do musician Jessie Ware and her mother Lennie get everyone from popstars to politicians to tell all on their podcast? They cook them lunchIf the British media are still looking for the new Jeremy Paxman, she’s been hiding in plain sight under our noses for four years now: a Jewish grandma with sciatica who won’t retire from her social work job, who won’t let hairdressers touch her hair “because they don’t make it big enough”, and who every single week has a celebrity round to her house, gets them drunk and then they tell all about their life, and she records it for the world to hear. Yes, it’s Lennie Ware, the 70-year-old star of Table Manners, the food podcast she co-hosts with her daughter, Jessie Ware. Although she hates saying her age out loud, “because it’s so horrendous. I was never going to have a 70th birthday party. I wanted to have a soixante-neuf party, which sounded much more exciting. But now I’m soixante-dix.”I’m talking to them both over Zoom, but I have also spent time with them in person, and they’re exactly as they seem on the much-loved show. Bickering, shrewd, droll, over-involved in each other’s lives, barging in and out, utterly alive. Jessie’s third child, born this year, is asleep in a sling around her neck while we talk, and another, a couple of years older, is pottering around. The firstborn is at school. Continue reading...
Experts from Internet Watch Foundation demand UK uses online safety bill to protect childrenExperts are finding fifteen times as much child sexual abuse material online as they were a decade ago, figures show.The online safety organisation the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), said its analysts were facing a “tidal wave” of abuse material. It called on the government to ensure the online safety bill, intended to improve internet safety, was used to protect children.
From pastiches of stilted old animations to trash-talking pubescents meeting their match, TikTok’s gaming zone is an often maddening place, full of energy, attitude – and space skullduggeryGaming culture has lived online since the internet became a thing, so it is no surprise that TikTok is now a primordial soup of video game memes. The time-honoured “greatest games of all time” magazine feature lives on as clip compilations soundtracked by thrice-remixed SoundCloud rap. Streamers post highlights from their live play, from unlikely kills to spectacular rage-quit explosions. Kids post skits that make fun of their parents’ dismissive attitude to games. Cosplayers dress up as game characters and jump on the latest dance craze. Trends explode for a week then disappear, like that month in 2020 when teenagers were posting clips of themselves studying to Mario Kart music.
The platform is full of tips, in-jokes, insights and some great mini-recitals, perfect for demystifying the music world. Our critic even learns how to play the violin hook to Britney Spears’ ToxicYou might not think TikTok lends itself to the best of classical music and opera. After all, no classical fan ever said: “What I really want is something recorded on a phone that lasts no more than 59 seconds and repeats itself immediately.” But TikTok does have something to offer – mainly to the intimidated potential listener who wants the music world to be demystified, or a music student who needs to be kicked back into the practice room.Most orchestras, opera companies and venues around the world haven’t yet worked out what to do with TikTok, or have decided to ignore it and hope it goes away, but there are a few major organisations who get it. They come across as being serious about welcoming new audiences, especially younger ones. Continue reading...
From the user proudly exhibiting his dad’s nudes to the woman making sculpting dangerous, art on TikTok is direct, intimate and confessional, with little time for the abstract or avant gardeArt on TikTok is more Tony Hart than Marcel Duchamp. It’s not hard to imagine the late BBC children’s artist enjoying “Here’s how I paint with a mop” and “Where I find monsters for my goth art”. You won’t find the next Steve McQueen or Tacita Dean here, uploading serious video art – or at least I haven’t – but you will encounter many enthusiasts and indefatigable outsiders.Avant garde art is in short supply on TikTok, though. But this simply reflects what’s happening in art galleries in the wake of BLM, as people use traditional methods to assert a new identity politics. Tabitha Whitley is a Brooklyn artist who creates prints and paintings of idealised, powerful Black faces, which she shares in TikTok vignettes. Continue reading...
Speech is out. Daft captions are in. Nearly everyone is beautiful. And one guy amassed 11m followers while living in emergency accommodation with his mum. Our critic samples TikTok comedyI’m used to consuming jokes and sketches as part of shows, as components of a bigger whole. But that experience leaves me rudderless on TikTok, where comedy is often conveyed in free-floating skits and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them stings. YouTube sketches are Infinite Jests by comparison.Ah, but “the shorter the video, the more you can condense your comedy into bite-size, shareable chunks”, according to one guide to TikTok comedy, suggesting that humour on the platform is as often about brand development as it is about making people laugh. Continue reading...
Report by MPs and peers says monitoring worker performance using AI should be regulated by lawMonitoring of workers and setting performance targets through algorithms is damaging employees’ mental health and needs to be controlled by new legislation, according to a group of MPs and peers.An “accountability for algorithms act’” would ensure that companies evaluate the effect of performance-driven regimes such as queue monitoring in supermarkets or deliveries-per-hour guidelines for delivery drivers, said the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on the future of work. Continue reading...
Billionaire offloads around 3% of his holding – though $1.1bn was already in train before he asked Twitter about reducing stakeElon Musk has sold about $5bn in shares amounting to roughly 3% of his Tesla holdings, the billionaire reported in filings on Wednesday, just days after he polled Twitter users about selling 10% of his stake.About $4bn worth of the sale – 3.6m shares – could be considered as counting towards his 10% pledge on Twitter. Another $1.1bn worth, amounting to 934,000 shares, was sold under an options arrangement to acquire nearly 2.2m shares that was already in train before the poll. Continue reading...
by Dominic Rushe in New York and Jasper Jolly in Lond on (#5RS8T)
Company was briefly worth over £100bn after flotation, more than Ford or General MotorsThe Jeff Bezos-backed electric carmaker Rivian has raised more than $11bn in a stock market sale that briefly valued the company at more than $100bn in one of the world’s biggest ever floats.The share sale on Wednesday was the largest since Facebook in 2012 and valued Rivian higher than Ford or General Motors, even though before the sale the company revealed it had lost more than $2bn since the start of last year and had delivered just 53 vehicles by the end of last month. It plans to deliver 1,000 by the end of the year. Continue reading...
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...
by Hannah J Davies, Hollie Richardson and Hannah Moor on (#5RHME)
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...
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington on (#5RFC5)
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...
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington on (#5RFSK)
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...
Technology | The Guardian