Advertisers on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger will no longer be able to market to under 18s based on their interestsFacebook will impose more control on the types of ads that children as young as 13 are exposed to on Instagram and other platforms, as new research finds Australian alcohol companies are not restricting their social media content from reaching younger users.Facebook announced on Wednesday that, starting in a few weeks, Instagram will stop advertisers marketing to teens under 18 based on their interests. Only their age, gender and location will be able to be used to target ads to them. Continue reading...

‘Perfect positive storm’ for big tech as pandemic fuels huge quarterly sales and stock market gainsGoogle, Apple and Microsoft reported record-breaking quarterly sales and profits on Tuesday night as the firms continue to benefit from a pandemic that has created a “perfect positive storm” for big tech. Continue reading...

In new column Internet wormhole, Guardian Australia writers take you to their favourite corner of the web. First up: an inviting – and voyeuristic – YouTube seriesLooking back to early pandemic times, it was probably Architectural Digest’s video tour of Dakota Johnson’s Hollywood home that nudged me down the YouTube hole of celebrity house tours.Like many millennials my Instagram feed is at any given moment peppered with aspirational content from sites like The Design Files and a stream of homogenous pastel-hued influencers. But sitting housebound with my partner and cat in our rented, single bedroom flat, the Fifty Shades of Grey star’s whimsical tour of her tastefully decorated mid century Hollywood home and kitchen stocked with unreasonable quantities of limes (“I love limes, they’re great and I like to present them like this in my house,” she explained) offered a welcome hit of late night escapism from the more foreboding stuff unfolding across the internet in March 2020. Continue reading...

Researchers are looking for volunteers for a study into whether search results really are influenced by previous browsing history

A global shortfall of semiconductors has affected the Tesla supply chain as well as car manufacturers across the worldTesla made a profit of more than $1bn in the last three months even as it struggled to keep up with demand for electric cars in the face of a global chip shortage.The company announced Monday that it has made a profit of $1.14bn in its second quarter, 10 times what it made a year ago and its eighth quarter of back-to-back profits. Continue reading...

French president reportedly spoke to Naftali Bennett to ensure ‘proper investigation’ after Pegasus projectEmmanuel Macron has reportedly spoken to the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to ensure that the Israeli government is “properly investigating” allegations that the French president could have been targeted with Israeli-made spyware by Morocco’s security services.In a phone call, Macron expressed concern that his phone and those of most of his cabinet could have been infected with Pegasus, hacking software developed by the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group, which enables operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones from infected devices. Continue reading...

Experts warn of danger of untraceable funds if companies accepting payments in cryptos go bustThe government could face “limitless” losses as a result of businesses that accept payments in untaxed and untraceable cryptocurrencies going bust, an insolvency expert has warned.A growing number of companies, including the ethical cosmetics firm Lush and office-sharing firm WeWork, have begun taking payments for goods and services in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, alongside debit payments, credit or cash. Continue reading...

Worldwide concern over the use of invasive spyware sold to autocratic regimesThe Pegasus project investigation has reverberated across the world; claims about the use of invasive spyware, and the governments that use the technology, have provoked demonstrations, political outrage and calls for industry regulation.Here, Guardian reporters pull together the impact of the investigation, which has put a spotlight on the government customers of the Israeli company NSO Group. Continue reading...

The Pegasus project has raised new concerns about the Israeli firm, which is a world leader in the niche surveillance marketIn 2019, when NSO Group was facing intense scrutiny, new investors in the Israeli surveillance company were on a PR offensive to reassure human rights groups.In an exchange of public letters in 2019, they told Amnesty International and other activists that they would do “whatever is necessary” to ensure NSO’s weapons-grade software would only be used to fight crime and terrorism. Continue reading...

New podcast Manatomy encourages famous men from Chris Hoy to Tim Minchin to open up about their insecurities. Plus: Mark Steel and Marina HydeManatomy

Kaseya’s universal key can free the files of hundreds of organizations, ending the worst of the attack’s falloutThe software company at the center of a huge ransomware attack this month has obtained a universal key to unlock files of the hundreds of businesses and public organizations crippled by the hack.Nineteen days after the initial attack over the Fourth of July weekend, the Florida-based IT management provider, Kaseya, has received the universal key that can unlock the scrambled data of all the attack’s victims, bringing the worst of the fallout to a close. Continue reading...

HSBC, PlayStation and others affected on Thursday in issue possibly related to Akamai Edge DNSThe websites of HSBC, ITV and Waitrose were among those hit by a widespread outage that briefly caused disruption on Thursday afternoon.Major online banking services – including Barclays, TSB, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Sainsbury’s Bank – were either entirely or partially inaccessible for a short period. Continue reading...

When I heard my number was on a leaked data list, I wasn’t surprised. Reporters have never been more vulnerableWhat does the new age of surveillance mean for the work of investigative journalists? Last year, I was preparing to fly from London to a country in the Middle East for a sensitive reporting trip. I wasn’t worried about my own safety – but now I have to take extraordinary measures to protect the security of my data.Bringing my own laptop or personal phone was out of the question. Instead I bought a completely new phone. I made sure not to sign into any of my accounts from the phone, and I did not save any numbers in the blank address book. Before I left, I created a temporary email address specifically for this trip, where sources could reach me. Continue reading...

Chest-mounted video camera and vibrating wristbands developed by US team reduce collisions by 37% in small studyVibrating wristbands could help visually impaired people to avoid collisions when out and about, a study indicates.According to the NHS, about 360,000 people in the UK alone are registered as blind or partially sighted, with long canes and guide dogs among the methods used to help individuals avoid obstacles. Continue reading...

AlphaFold program’s prediction of nearly 20,000 human protein structures now free for researchersLast year the artificial intelligence group DeepMind cracked a mystery that has flummoxed scientists for decades: stripping bare the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. Now, having amassed a database of nearly all human protein structures, the company is making the resource available online free for researchers to use.The key to understanding our basic biological machinery is its architecture. The chains of amino acids that comprise proteins twist and turn to make the most confounding of 3D shapes. It is this elaborate form that explains protein function; from enzymes that are crucial to metabolism to antibodies that fight infectious attacks. Continue reading...

It bills itself as the ‘digital currency for the MAGA community’ but data shows most of the magacoin is allocated to its self-styled creatorMore than 1,000 people have so far signed up to the pro-Trump cryptocurrency magacoin, including conservative media personalities and Republican figures, the Guardian can reveal.The news comes after poor security configuration in a website associated with magacoin exposed the email addresses, passwords, cryptocurrency wallet addresses and IP addresses of users who have bought in to what its promoters describe as the “digital currency for the MAGA community”. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of the July 2021 full moon, which is also known as the buck or thunder moon.When a full moon rises, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try and get an Instagram-worthy photograph, but unfortunately the moon is really challenging to get a great photo of.Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...

Workers for app companies call for better wages and protections for those seeking to unionizeHundreds of Uber and Lyft drivers have joined other app-based workers across the US for a day-long strike to protest against poor working conditions and demand the right to organize. Continue reading...

The founder of the electric carmaker says coins are mined using at least 50% renewable power, sending the price up sharplyTesla will most likely restart accepting bitcoin as payment once it conducts due diligence on the amount of renewable energy used to mine the currency, the founder and boss of the electric carmaker, Elon Musk, has said.Musk sent the price of bitcoin into freefall in May when he said that Tesla would stop accepting the cryptocurrency for payment because it the so-called mining of the coins used too much fossil fuel-generated electricity. Continue reading...

22-year-old faces multiple charges in connection with attacks on accounts of politicians and celebritiesA 22-year-old British citizen has been arrested in Spain in connection with a July 2020 Twitter hack that compromised the accounts of high-profile politicians and celebrities, the US Justice Department said on Wednesday.It named the British man as Joseph James O’Connor and said he faced multiple charges. He was also accused in a criminal complaint of computer intrusions related to takeovers of TikTok and Snapchat accounts, including one incident involving sextortion, as well as cyberstalking a 16-year-old juvenile. Continue reading...

Popular overseas, vaccine badges are rolling out locally on online dating platforms like Bumble. But with access to a Covid jab still a concern, one CEO urges caution

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: Spotlight on Apple security … shake-up in the video game market … online age verification … and space tourismYou will, by now, have heard about Pegasus. It’s the brand name for a family of spyware tools sold by the NSO Group, an Israeli outfit of hackers-for-hire who sell their wares to intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and militaries around the world. Continue reading...

Misinformation ‘superspreader’ accounts found still active even as vaccination rates flag and cases rise in USFacebook is under fire once again over the proliferation of vaccine misinformation on its platform, after Joe Biden said tech giants such as Facebook are “killing people” for failing to tackle the problem.The White House has also zeroed in on the “disinformation dozen”: accounts that have been shown to be responsible for the bulk of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. Continue reading...

Rapid digitalisation of banking services and increasing reliance on just three tech giants has made the Bank uneasyThe Bank of England is at risk of moving too slow, according to experts, who say it needs to get a grip on the financial sector’s plans to outsource customer data storage to a handful of unregulated US tech giants.Last week, the central bank raised fresh concerns about the use of cloud services, where data is held on remote servers run by another company. It said the fact the services were dominated by just a few companies – such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft – posed a potential threat to financial stability. Continue reading...

European regulator want banks to hold personal details of cryptocurrency clients, while US wants swift work to establish less volatile ‘stablecoins’Bitcoin has slipped below $30,000 as calls grew among regulators in the US, Europe and Asia for tighter checks on cryptocurrencies, and the less volatile digi-currency known as “stablecoins”.Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency fell as much as 5% to $29,300, its lowest since 22 June, and investors said it was likely to test the $28,600 level touched last month, its lowest since early January, as it faced a variety of regulatory headwinds. Smaller cryptocurrencies such as ether and XRP also lost around 5%. Continue reading...

Host repeated false claim coronavirus vaccine ‘transmitting to unvaccinated people’

Jeff Bezos has completed his pioneering foray into space. The Amazon founder and three crewmates touched down in the Texas desert early on Tuesday after a sub-orbital flight lasting 11 minutes.Bezos, 57, one of the world’s richest people with an estimated net worth of $206bn (£151bn), has attracted criticism for investing his fortune into space tourism amid concerns over working conditions at Amazon, and 'aggressive tax avoidance'

Valve’s newly announced handheld console promises to put the latest PC games in your pocket. But do they belong there?It looks like Valve has done it again. The company that surprised everyone by pivoting from game developer to digital shopkeeper with the launch of Steam, then leapt into virtual reality with the HTC Vive and Valve Index headsets, is now taking on Nintendo with a powerful handheld games console.Announced on 16 July and due to launch in December, the Steam Deck features a 7in LCD touchscreen, an array of analogue and touch-pad controls, a gyroscope for motion detection, wifi connectivity and a base station so it can be hooked up to a monitor. Tech-wise, it’s built around a custom Zen 2 AMD processor, AMD RDNA 2 GPU and 16GB of memory. In a recent deep dive on the machine’s specs, Eurogamer found it compared to the Xbox Series S console in terms of performance. Continue reading...

I can’t persuade the ride-hailing company something is wrong even though its bill is absurdLast week I booked an Uber from our favourite pub to my home in north London – a trip of 1.75 miles I have taken several hundred times.I was riding with two friends whom I regularly drop off on the way. I asked the driver to use my preferred route, he refused and a row ensued, to the point where he ejected us from the cab in the rain. Continue reading...

Future fund scheme will see the Treasury co-invest with private enterprise in bid to make UK a ‘science superpower’

President says he hopes platform won’t take his earlier remark ‘personally’ and instead act to save livesJoe Biden has tempered his assessment that social media platforms are “killing people” by hosting misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines, saying Monday that he hoped they would not take it “personally” and instead would act to save lives.While companies like Facebook defend their practices and say they are helping people around the world access verified information about the shots, the White House says they haven’t done enough to stop misinformation that has helped to slow the pace of new vaccinations in the US to a trickle. It comes as the US sees a rise in virus cases and deaths among those who haven’t gotten a shot, in what officials call an emerging “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Continue reading...

Britain has joined the US and other allies in formally accusing China of being behind the cyber-attackIn March, tens of thousands of organisations around the world discovered their private internal discussions had been cracked open and lain bare by a group of Chinese hackers.Four previously undiscovered weaknesses in Microsoft’s Exchange software, known as “zero days” because of the amount of time the company had had to fix the flaws before they were exploited, lay behind the mass hack. The vulnerabilities, which affected software released from 2012 onwards, allowed the group to take permanent control of the corporate servers, siphoning emails, calendars, and anything else they desired. Continue reading...

The iPhone maker says it is keeping pace with malware, but the Pegasus project paints a worrying pictureIt is one of the technological battles of the 21st century – in which every mobile phone user has a stake.In one corner, Apple, which has more than a billion active iPhones being used across the world. In the other, companies such as Israel’s NSO Group, developing spyware designed to defeat the most sophisticated security and privacy measures. Continue reading...

Move expands Chinese tech company’s presence in the global video games marketChina’s Tencent has agreed to buy the British video games developer Sumo Group at a valuation of more than £900m, further expanding the tech company’s presence in the global video games market.Sumo’s board has agreed to Tencent’s offer of 513p a share, valuing the London-listed company at £919m, it announced on Monday. Continue reading...

AI in games has long been geared towards improving computer-controlled opponents. Will it soon create diverse characters we can talk to instead of just shoot?In May, as part of an otherwise unremarkable corporate strategy meeting, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida made an interesting announcement. The company’s artificial intelligence research division, Sony AI, would be collaborating with PlayStation developers to create intelligent computer-controlled characters. “By leveraging reinforcement learning,” he wrote, “we are developing game AI agents that can be a player’s in-game opponent or collaboration partner.” Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning in which an AI effectively teaches itself how to act through trial and error. In short, these characters will mimic human players. To some extent, they will think. Continue reading...

User uploads secret files to prove how tank was ‘incorrectly’ modelled in game played worldwideClassified details of the British Army’s main battle tank, Challenger 2, have been leaked online after a player in a tank battle video game disputed its accuracy.The player, who claimed to have been a real life Challenger 2 tank commander and gunnery instructor, disputed the design of the tank in the popular combat video game “War Thunder”, arguing it needed changing. He claimed game designers had failed to “model it properly”. Continue reading...

Sustainable alternatives to livestock farming are being held back by patents, a reluctance to share research and lack of government supportNot a week goes by without Elliot Swartz receiving at least one request from researchers asking him where they can find cell lines (a cell culture developed from a single cell) for use in cellular agriculture – an essential tool for creating lab-grown meat. “One of the most important things that cell lines offer is that they enable researchers to just get started in this new field,” says Swartz, who works in New York as a senior scientist at the Good Food Institute (GFI) – a nonprofit focused on advancing cellular agriculture and bringing its products to our shelves and stomachs as quickly as possible. Helping researchers is a core part of his role. In the case of cell lines, however, there’s very little he can do.Swartz’s response to the researchers is unfortunately always the same: at the moment, publicly available cell lines relevant for cellular agriculture don’t really exist. That doesn’t mean that they’re nowhere to be found. Upside Foods (previously Memphis Meats) has submitted several patents to protect cell lines it has developed, and companies such as Cell Farm Food Tech have built a business around selling cell lines for profit. Keeping discoveries behind closed doors is a pattern of behaviour found in private companies across the industry, which many believe is slowing down innovation. Continue reading...

Amol Rajan’s questioning failed to get behind the defences of Sundar Pichai’s ‘nice guy’ media imageLast weekend, in what the BBC clearly regarded as important news, the corporation announced that its media editor, Amol Rajan, had been granted an interview with Sundar Pichai, the current CEO of Alphabet (which basically means Google). It was billed as “the first of a series of interviews with global figures”. If the boss of Google counts as a global figure, one wonders who else is on the list, the CEO of ExxonMobil?And the takeaway from watching this encounter? Simply this: Mr Pichai is a nice guy. He comes from a modest background in India, dropped out of Stanford in the time-honoured manner, has an MBA from Wharton and has worked for Google since 2004. He’s been CEO of Google (and Alphabet, its holding company) since 2015. Continue reading...

Joe Biden says social media platforms such as Facebook 'are killing people' for allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted.'Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,' the US president told reporters at the White House on Friday.

Additional emojis aim to complete Unicode’s drive to offer more variety and gender-neutral optionsA pregnant man, a multiracial handshake and a face that cannot bear to watch are some of the emojis that will hit devices over the next year, according to a draft list published by the Unicode Consortium, which approves icons for use. Continue reading...

Organisations in Scotland say they have tried to contact Google about the dangers but received no replyScottish mountaineering charities have criticised Google for suggesting routes up Ben Nevis and other mountains they say are “potentially fatal” and direct people over a cliff.The John Muir Trust, which looks after the upper reaches of the UK’s highest mountain, said attempts to contact the company over the issue had been met with silence. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Nintendo

Up for discussion in the first Guardian tech newsletter: can artificial intelligence enhance rather than replace us … internet age verification … plus Google’s €500m French fineHello and welcome to the debut issue of TechScape, the Guardian’s newsletter on all things tech, and sometimes things not-tech if they’re interesting enough. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have you here with me, and I hope between us we can build not just a newsletter, but a news community. Continue reading...

Social news aggregator has had to grapple with growing calls to deal with misinformation and conspiracy theories on platformThe head of social news aggregator Reddit has argued its own community and administrators are the best moderator against misinformation, as the company plans to open an office in Australia for the first time.In the past year since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, misinformation on social media platforms has been under close scrutiny. Much of the focus has been on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, while Reddit has escaped the spotlight. Continue reading...

Experts are urging the federal government to develop a mandatory reporting regime for such cyber-attacksAustralian organisations are seen as soft and lucrative targets for ransomware attacks, according to cybersecurity experts who warn the problem will get worse unless the Morrison government fills the “current policy vacuum”.A report published on Tuesday cites a raft of attacks over the past 18 months, including one that brought Nine Entertainment “to its knees” in March and left it struggling to televise news bulletins and produce newspapers. Continue reading...

After his rocket plane reached 53 miles above Earth on Sunday, the founder of Virgin Galactic is now officially an astronaut. But not everyone’s convincedName: Richard Branson.Age: 70. Continue reading...

Sealed cartridge dating from 1996 is described as one of fewer than five copies in such conditionA sealed, mint condition copy of the video game Super Mario 64 has sold at auction for more than $1.5m (£1.1m), making it the most expensive video game ever sold.The game cartridge, dating from 1996, was in high demand at US auction house Heritage Auctions for its “historical significance, rarity and condition” since there are “fewer than five copies” in such good condition. Continue reading...

Influencers including Kyle Thomas, Ehiz Ufuah and Poppy O’Toole will offer sessions on creating contentTikTok has opened its first pop-up venue in the UK, allowing fans to interact with influencers who have found success via the social media app and try to create their own mini-films.The app, which allows users to create and share short videos soundtracked with music, has partnered with the Westfield shopping centre in west London to create the first TikTok For You House. The design of the pop-up venue, which will be open until 8 August, is inspired by TikTok’s homepage, which highlights trending clips. Continue reading...