Lawsuit says TikTok violated law that prohibits collecting, using or disclosing personal information from children under 13 without parental consentThe US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have sued TikTok and its parent company ByteDance for allegedly failing to protect children's privacy on the social media app.The government said TikTok violated a law that prohibits collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under 13 without parental consent. Continue reading...
PM accused of ignoring civil rights and aping autocracies as he proposes new powers after far-right unrestCivil liberties campaigners have said that a proposal made by Keir Starmer on Thursday to expand the use of live facial recognition technology would amount to the effective introduction of a national ID card system based on people's faces.Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said it was ironic the new prime minister was suggesting a greater use of facial matching on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force. Continue reading...
Robert Skidelsky is concerned about the surveillance potential or AI, while Brian Reffin Smith is worried about its capacity to hijack culture, and Michael Heaton warns that it relieves us of the need to thinkIn his interesting opinion article (Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI, 27 July), Ed Newton-Rex misses one of the most serious concerns about artificial intelligence: its surveillance potential. Governments have always spied on their subjects/citizens: technology multiplies their powers of spying.In his novel 1984, George Orwell had the authorities install a two-way telescreen system in every party member's home, and in all workplaces and public spaces. This allowed Big Brother to monitor individuals' actions and conversations, while he himself remained invisible. Continue reading...
Meet Friend: a Tamagotchi with a soul', wearable AI companion that records your interactions and texts backYour friend is named Amy. Or Jackson. Or whatever name you'd like. They support you, rib you and check in on how you're doing. They're a blisteringly attentive listener who will never ask you to help them move, or to come see their one-man play. They cost $99 and are expected to ship out in early 2025.Meet Friend: a new wearable AI companion that you wear around your neck. The small, white, puck-shaped device records your every word and interaction and responds accordingly by text. (The company says it does not store the audio; according to the website, data is encrypted and users can delete memories".) An ad for the product shows people wearing it while they hike, game, work and flirt. How's the falafel?" Friend asks a woman eating falafel wrap. You're getting thrashed, it's embarrassing!" Friend texts a guy playing video games with friends (human). Continue reading...
Workers picket at Warner Bros Studios against what they say is unwillingness from firms to protect union membersMore than 300 video game performers and Hollywood actors picketed in front of the Warner Bros Studios building on Thursday to protest against what they call an unwillingness from top gaming companies to protect union voice actors and motion capture workers equally against the unregulated use of artificial intelligence.Standing before the crowd, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Sag-Aftra), said that AI has become the most challenging issue in many of the union's negotiations. Continue reading...
Ex-CNN anchor alleges fraud and breach of contract after X Corp owner abruptly ended video series partnershipThe former CNN anchor Don Lemon has sued Elon Musk and X over a cancelled deal with the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.His filing in California superior court in San Francisco includes claims of fraud, negligent misrepresentation, misappropriation of Lemon's name and likeness, and breach of express contract. Continue reading...
Company says it will vigorously defend claim by pension fund that its stock price was kept artificially highCrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind July's mass computer outage around the world, has been issued with an investor lawsuit accusing it of defrauding investors.The class action suit, filed in Texas by Plymouth County Retirement Association, a pension fund, argues that CrowdStrike misled investors by attesting that the company's technology was validated, tested and certified". In fact, the investors say, CrowdStrike's software was no such thing. Continue reading...
Launched in 2012, the tile-matching puzzler quickly became ubiquitous on phones. More than 10 years later, 200 million people are still playing. Why?A lot of us were, at one point, in love with our smartphones. In the early days of Android and iPhone, apps seemed designed to delight; throw a few quid at the app store in 2010 and you could be playing some cute game, often involving birds, or messing around with a lightsaber within minutes. Social media apps designed for phones let us post artfully casual photos in a few taps, for our friends to drop hearts on. It was fun, once.But over time, it's become a toxic relationship. The fun got sucked out of everything. Social media morphed into a hellscape designed to ensnare and enrage us, providing just enough of our friends' posts to prevent us from actually quitting the platform but prioritising their own ads and algorithmic videos. Twitter used to be jokes and cat memes and now it's ... well, it's X, and I know I'm not the only one who's deleted it off their phone entirely. The experience of using apps, phones and the internet more generally has significantly degraded - and the same can be said for mobile games, most of which now give you about 83 seconds of entertainment before trying to extort you for a 7.99 monthly subscription or showing you misleading ads that are so fascinatingly terrible you can't look away. Continue reading...
President Javier Milei creates security unit as some say certain groups may be overly scrutinized by the technologyArgentina's security forces have announced plans to use artificial intelligence to predict future crimes" in a move experts have warned could threaten citizens' rights.The country's far-right president Javier Milei this week created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which the legislation says will use machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes". It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify wanted persons", patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities. Continue reading...
Stock price grew around 5%, which revealed the company outperformed analysts' expectations for its second quarterMeta's shares rose in after-hours trading on Wednesday off the back of a strong earnings report that comes as the company is spending heavily on AI tools.The company's stock price grew around 5% following the report, which revealed the company outperformed analysts' expectations for its second quarter. Continue reading...
More than 100 Silicon Valley investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reed Hastings, launch website VCs for KamalaA group of more than 100 Silicon Valley investors, including Mark Cuban, the TV host and NBA owner, and Reed Hastings, a co-founder of LinkedIn, launched a website in support of Kamala Harris.A statement said vcsforkamala.org expressed support for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee from venture capital investors, founders and tech leaders who pledge to vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election". Continue reading...
In this week's newsletter: We've become so used to digitally downloading games now that it's easy to forget how novel it once was, thanks to places like Xbox 360's Marketplace Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThe Xbox 360 digital store is the latest to go offline, following the Wii U and 3DS store shutdown in March. It shut down on Monday, taking about 220 games with it, according to analysis by Video Games Chronicle. Preservation activists at the Video Game History Foundation even made a funeral cake.Microsoft is definitely the best of the major companies when it comes to backwards compatibility and game preservation - despite those 220 lost games, a huge percentage of the Xbox 360's back catalogue can still legally be played on later consoles. And it is remarkable that the Xbox 360 Marketplace lasted almost 20 years (the console was released in late 2005). It wasn't the first digital store on a console, but it was the first one I ever used, and I assume the same was true for a lot of British players - the Xbox 360 was the most popular console of its generation in this country. In retrospect, the Marketplace was astonishingly ahead of its time. Continue reading...
Set in the year between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws follows Kay, an ambitious street thief as she plots a giant heist. We meet the gang behind the gangAbout 10 minutes into the latest preview build of Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's forthcoming open-world adventure, lead character Kay Vess enters Mirogana: a densely populated, worn-down city on the desolate moon of Toshara. Around us is a mix of sandstone hovels and metallic sci-fi buildings, crammed with flickering computer panels, neon signs and holographic adverts. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, R2 droids glide past twittering to themselves. Nearby is a cantina, its shady clientele visible through the smoky doorway, and just to the side is a dimly lit gambling parlour.As you explore, robotic voices read out imperial propaganda over public address systems and stormtroopers patrol the streets, checking IDs. At least as far as this lifelong Star Wars fan is concerned, these moments perfectly capture the aesthetics and atmosphere of the original trilogy. Like A New Hope itself, it's a promising beginning. Continue reading...
CMA to consider whether deal with AI startup is a potential merger, which could prompt full investigationThe Competition and Markets Authority has begun a preliminary investigation into a partnership between Google and the AI startup Anthropic, marking the latest in a string of investigations into deals between big tech companies and smallerAI ones.Google invested $2bn (about 1.56bn) into Anthropic in 2023, shortly after signing a cloud computing agreement with the startup, which develops the Claude LLM and chatbot. Continue reading...
by Eleni Courea Political correspondent on (#6PKEW)
Watchdog reprimands Electoral Commission for not being up to date with security updates before hack in August 2021The UK's election watchdog has been reprimanded over online security lapses that allowed the personal information of 40 million voters to be hacked.The Information Commissioner's Office said the Electoral Commission had not kept its servers up to date with the latest security updates before the data breach, which occurred in August 2021 but was not identified until October 2022. Continue reading...
The ChatGPT maker is betting big, while Google hopes its AI tools won't replace workers, but help them to work better Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereWhat if you build it and they don't come?It's fair to say the shine is coming off the AI boom. Soaring valuations are starting to look unstable next to the sky-high spending required to sustain them. Over the weekend, one report from tech site the Information estimated that OpenAI was on course to spend an astonishing $5bn more than it makes in revenue this year alone:If we're right, OpenAI, most recently valued at $80bn, will need to raise more cash in the next 12 months or so. We've based our analysis on our informed estimates of what OpenAI spends to run its ChatGPT chatbot and train future large language models, plus guesstimates' of what OpenAI's staffing would cost, based on its prior projections and what we know about its hiring. Our conclusion pinpoints why so many investors worry about the profit prospects of conversational artificial intelligence.In this paper, we argue against the view that when ChatGPT and the like produce false claims, they are lying or even hallucinating, and in favour of the position that the activity they are engaged in is bullshitting ... Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.Part of what's tricky about us talking about it now is that we actually don't know exactly what's going to transpire. What we do know is the first step is going to be sitting down [with the partners] and really understanding the use cases. If it's school administrators versus people in the classroom, what are the particular tasks we actually want to get after for these folks?If you are a school teacher some of it might be a simple email with ideas about how to use Gemini in lesson planning, some of it might be formal classroom training, some of it one on one coaching. Across 1,200 people there will be a lot of different pilots, each group with around 100 people. Continue reading...
Hypnospace Outlaw's creative director Jay Tholen returns with a sequel that promises more tongue-in-cheek fun for people old enough to remember GeoCitiesIt's been five years since Hypnospace Outlaw, Tendershoot's brilliantly wacky 90s internet simulator, and this spiritual sequel was announced two years ago. In the intervening time, with tech moguls snapping up social media giants, Reddit getting monetised (and in effect, censored) against the wishes of its user base, and the ever-growing presence of AI, the millennial generation's yearning for the algorithm-free wild west days of the early internet has only become more intense. At least that's how creative director Jay Tholen feels.I thought it was already bad then, but I didn't know how bad it could get," Tholen says on the current state of the world wide web.Dreamsettler will (hopefully) be released in 2025, on PC and Xbox Series X. Continue reading...
Doctored campaign video featuring US vice-president reposted by Tesla chief executive watched 128m timesKamala Harris's election campaign has accused Elon Musk of spreading manipulated lies" after the Tesla chief executive posted a doctored video featuring the vice-president on his X account.Musk reposted a manipulated Harris campaign video on Friday evening in which a fake Harris voiceover says: I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire," and that anyone who criticises her is both sexist and racist". Continue reading...
In this uniquely absurd mishmash of adventure and dating game, you are a house looking for love on an island of eligible bachelor padsNavigating the perils of the contemporary dating scene is a formidable task for any singleton. How much do you really have in common with this stranger? Do you share the same values? Can you be vulnerable enough to let them in? With Building Relationships, game developer Tanat Boozayaangool considers all of these pressing questions, while asking one more - what if you were also a house?Yes, the title of this dating adventure game is to be taken literally. In Building Relationships, you play as the latest eligible bachelorx pad" on an island of romantic opportunity. Your main goal is to crack on with its other citizens, which include himbo tents, blunt houseboats, and a windmill, for good measure. Millie (the windmill) is pretty flirty, and it comes out of nowhere sometimes," says Boozayaangool. People are either really into it or not at all."Building Relationships will be released on PC; release date TBC Continue reading...
For the twin photographers, this spontaneous shot captures the timeless pleasures of a day by the seaConey Island beach and boardwalk is such an iconic fixture in so many people's New York summers," Mariel Tyler says of the location of this iPhone photograph. She and her twin sister, Katherine, make up the Tyler Twins, professional photographers who specialise in celebrity portraits, events and concerts. Past subjects include Jay-Z, Whoopi Goldberg and Lady Gaga.Mariel took this image in 2015. Normally when we shoot professionally, we pass the camera back and forth. Whoever is not shooting is directing. We rarely remember, or care, who took what shot. It's always a joint effort," Mariel says. This shot was entirely spontaneous. The work I do with my sister often has to be more thought out, so it's nice to shoot without expectations sometimes. On this occasion, Katherine was on a work trip in LA but, ironically, had taken photos of Santa Monica pier earlier that day." Continue reading...
Social media platform uses pre-ticked boxes of consent, a practice that violates UK and EU GDPR rulesElon Musk's X platform is under pressure from data regulators after it emerged that users are consenting to their posts being used to build artificial intelligence systems via a default setting on the app.The UK and Irish data watchdogs said they have contacted X over the apparent attempt to gain user consent for data harvesting without them knowing about it. Continue reading...
Prototype, initially launching with select publishers and users, set to challenge Google's dominance of online searchOpenAI is testing a new search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence to produce results, raising the prospect of a significant challenge to Google's dominance of the online search market.SearchGPT will launch with a small group of users and publishers before a potential wider rollout, the company announced on Thursday. OpenAI ultimately intends to incorporate the search features into ChatGPT, rather offer a standalone product. Continue reading...
National Cyber Security Centre warns of global hacking effort to obtain nuclear and defence intelligenceNorth Korean state-backed hackers have mounted a campaign to obtain secrets related to nuclear materials, military drones, submarines and shipbuilding in the UK and US, as intelligence agencies warned of a global cyber-espionage campaign" targeting sensitive industries.A joint notice from the US, UK and South Korea warned that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was using state-backed attackers to further the regime's military and nuclear ambitions. It added that Japan and India had also been targeted. Continue reading...
$10 UberEats vouchers sent to people who helped after global IT outage are flagged as potential fraudAn attempt by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to thank workers who tackled the recent global IT outage with a $10 UberEats voucher hit a stumbling block after Uber flagged the gesture as potential fraud.CrowdStrike confirmed that it sent the $10 voucher to teammates and partners" who helped customers affected by a faulty software update it issued. Continue reading...
This cutesy and surprisingly intuitive brain teaser pushes the idea of the sliding-block puzzle to the very limitsFor Jemma, her whole life feels like a puzzle. Left on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, she has never felt as if she fitted in, and is desperate to see what the world looks like outside her small town, which nobody ever leaves. More pertinently, whenever she moves, the whole world moves along with her - like sliding tiles, like a series of conveyor belts. It really is a puzzle getting her from A to B.Each scene in Arranger: A Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding-block puzzle, where you must think two or three steps ahead to move Jemma and the objects around her in the right directions. Some things, such as rocks and robot birds covered in purple static, don't move alongside her, but everything else does. So you have to transport swords towards monsters that stand in the way, keys towards doors, bananas towards shy orangutans. Unless her way is blocked, when Jemma hits the end of a vertical or horizontal row she rematerialises at the other end, adding another layer of spatial logic. Continue reading...
Research commissioned by Google estimates 31% of jobs would be insulated from AI and 61% radically transformed by itAlmost two-thirds of British jobs could be enhanced" with AI, Google has claimed, with only a tiny proportion at risk of being phased out" entirely.Instead of worrying about job losses caused by AI, the focus needed to be on making sure the millions of Britons who could work in smarter and faster ways with AI tech got the support to use it, the company said. Continue reading...
This beautiful-looking action game is based on Journey to the West, the great Chinese novel - but its own journey to release has hit a bump in the roadWhen Chinese developer Game Science revealed its debut console game Black Myth: Wukong last year, it immediately caused a stir. Inspired by the great 16th-century Chinese novel, Journey to the West, the action-packed footage featured the titular mythological monkey Sun Wukong battling Buddhist-folklore demons and sword-wielding anthropomorphic foxes in lusciously rendered forests. Smartphone games are inordinately popular in China, but console game developers are still few and far between, and the excitement for Wukong in Game Science's homeland reached fever pitch. Within 24 hours, the trailer racked up 2m views on YouTube and more than 10m on Chinese video sharing site Bilibili, much to its creators' shock and delight. One excited fan even broke into the developer's office, desperate for more info on the game.After playing Wukong for an hour and half in a London hotel suite, watched nervously by several Game Science employees, I can confirm that - somewhat miraculously - this stunning Chinese mythological twist on Dark Souls delivers on that showy trailer, marrying fluid-feeling combat with reflex-testing difficulty and the expensive filmic sheen of something like God of War. As I sprint through Wukong's dense jungle, ducking and dodging through its deadly array of flora and fauna, I come face to face with everything from gi-wearing toads to nightmarish, gigantic-headed infants. Unlike many of its brutally challenging, FromSoftware-inspired peers, the difficulty in Wukong feels expertly judged. My simian avatar met a grizzly end more times than I'd care to admit, but I persevered. Eventually I defeated enough foes to unlock new abilities. Soon I can perch atop my staff mid-attack, giving me an edge against its murderous mythological monsters. I can buzz around the forest as a stealthy cicada, summon flames with my glaive, and eventually topple a snarling, lorry-sized werewolf atop a crumbling temple. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Charlie Lindlar, Hollie Richardson on (#6PFNB)
Hipster ornithologist Matt Spracklen makes birds cool, while Elizabeth Day introduces an an insightful how-to series. Plus: five of the best podcasts about ancient history Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereTom Slick: Mystery Hunter
Banking and healthcare firms, major airlines expected to suffer most losses, according to insurer ParametrixThe global technology outage sparked by CrowdStrike's faulty update will cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn, insurers estimated, as the cybersecurity firm vowed to make changes to prevent it from happening again.The projected financial losses exclude Microsoft, the tech giant whose systems suffered widespread failures in the crash. Continue reading...
Two-child cap | Year-round holly berries | Palace costs | Old technology | Rubber band ballPolly Toynbee says she will eat her hat if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves don't get rid of the two-child cap soon (Starmer will bin the two-child benefit cap and outdo New Labour on tackling poverty - I'll bet on it, 19 July). As a grandad with less hair than he used to have, I have a number of tasteful hats. I'll be keeping the tastiest one for her.
I'm no expert, but knowing my neighborhood's trees and flowers by name makes me feel groundedEighteen months ago, I adopted a dog. Now I'm out on the streets of Brooklyn with my hound mix for at least an hour a day, strolling and wrestling discarded chicken bones from her jaws. You notice a lot when you visit the same few blocks over and over: which avenues are the quietest, or when the rusty scaffolding around a nearby building vanishes overnight.Most of all, I love to admire neighborhood greenery. I'm an adoring fan of the tulips, peonies and dogwood flowers that burst forth in the spring. Yet I quickly realized how limited my plant vocabulary was. Yes, I knew that was a silver birch, because of its papery bark. But what was that taller tree, glossy and looming, or that pale shrub with tiny, ornate leaves? I grew up in Australia, where the vegetation is pretty different from that of the US north-east, and I really hadn't made an effort to learn about the locals. It felt disrespectful, to say the least. Continue reading...
This strange, dark game is an allegory about voyeurism and transactional sex that gives ample space to freak ourselves out - and critics and players can't get enough Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereA man wearing a weird animalistic mask sits slumped in an armchair in a grotty motel room, watching you click a handheld tally counter. He says he will pay you $14,000 if you click until the numbers reset at 10,000 - so that's what you do. Occasionally, he makes polite yet suggestive demands - do it faster, slower, stop, start again - but he doesn't move except to occasionally flex his hands.While you click, using the left mouse button, you wander the room, looking at the paintings on the wall, the detuned TV, the thermostat. But as you edge toward the end number, the man slowly begins to reveal snippets of his life, and the already dark tone of the world grows dimmer by the second. That's it, that's the whole game. Continue reading...
A new exhibition showcases British hobbies, the Rotterdam Architectural Biennial and a South Asian London city mapBoth mending and hobby crafts get the respect they deserve in this month's design news. Check our stories to see where these fine activities get treated as art. We also look at the history of Casio watches and a new future for the Apple Watch. Sign up for the Design Review newsletter to receive more stories like this about architecture, sustainability and craft each month. Continue reading...
Musk said it was not true' that he was planning large monthly donations but said he had created America Pac' and is making lower level' donationsTesla CEO Elon Musk has denied reports that emerged last week that he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected.On Tuesday, Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson's show, where he said the claim was simply not true". I am not donating $45m a month to Trump," he said. Continue reading...
Alphabet reports $84.7bn in revenue, on back of Search and Cloud, up from the same period last yearGoogle's parent company, Alphabet, outperformed analysts' expectations on Tuesday, reporting second-quarter earnings of $1.89 per share, the same as its first quarter results.Alphabet's CEO, Sundar Pichai, touted the results as proof that the company's investments across different areas of its tech empire were seeing positive returns. Continue reading...
Non-interactive cinematic sequences remove control from our hands at games' most emotional moments. Can't players be trusted to take part in stories?At the close of Metal Gear Solid 4, just after Snake pulverises Liquid Ocelot, there is series of cutscenes that never ends. Well, that's not strictly true. It does end - after 71 minutes - it's just that I've never watched that far. I understand that the game's director Hideo Kojima is a committed cinephile who has drawn much of his inspiration from movies, but I don't care. Those are minutes of my life I'll never get back.I also don't care for the 20-minute cinematic sequences dotted through Xenoblade Chronicles or Final Fantasy, or the seemingly hundreds of non-interactive scenes detailing every single plot point in the Assassin's Creed adventures. It's needlessly aggressive to rob the player of agency, then bully them into paying attention for prolonged periods. I think it's time we retired the whole convention. Continue reading...
Israeli company aims for stock market flotation after spurning biggest deal in tech group's historyThe cybersecurity firm Wiz has turned down a $23bn (18bn) takeover bid from Google's parent, Alphabet, spurning what would have been the tech company's biggest ever acquisition and seeking a stock market flotation instead.Alphabet had been in talks with Wiz, founded by alumni of Israel's cyberintelligence unit, as it seeks to catch rivals Microsoft and Amazon in the hyper-competitive cloud services market. Continue reading...
As the world recovers from the largest IT outage in history, it shows the danger of one point of failure in IT infrastructureA global IT failure wreaked havoc on Friday, grounding flights and disrupting everything from hospitals to government agencies. Over all the chaos hung a question: how did a flawed update to Microsoft Windows software bring large swaths of society to a screeching halt?The problem originated with an Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, relied upon by most of the global technology industry, including Microsoft, for its Falcon program, which blocks the execution of malware and cyber-attacks. Falcon protects devices by securing access to a wide range of internal systems and automatically updating its defenses - a level of integration that means if Falcon falters, the computer is close behind. After CrowdStrike updated Falcon on Thursday night, Microsoft systems and Windows PCs were hit with a blue screen of death" and rendered unusable as they were trapped in a recovery boot loop. Continue reading...
There has been disruption at airports around the world, as well as banks, supermarkets and media outlets, after Windows workstations were hit by a 'blue screen of death'. Long queues of passengers formed in airports in the UK, US, India and Spain as some airlines warned of delays and grounded flights
In this week's newsletter: Work, life and parenting mean I can't dive into massive games like I used to, but then I found a hack to making the time I need Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereI miss very few things about being a teenager, but I do miss all the time I had back then to play video games. I got great joy out of binge-playing into the small hours, an opportunity I almost never get now as a busy adult. Aside from covering games for work it feels as if I barely get time to play at all, which explains my affection for games that can be polished off in a couple of evenings, rather than the gigantic, absorbing role-playing games I used to crave. I have pretty much made peace with this. My days of 100-hour epics and/or live-service online games are behind me. They'll be back eventually, when my kids are bigger.But it's been more than two years since Elden Ring came out - a game in my favourite genre, by my favourite director - and I suddenly got very fed up about the fact that I'd barely played it. I've picked away at the game on PS5, but never got out of the (admittedly vast) starting area of Limgrave. I kept hoping that my partner might take the kids away for a weekend, or that I might manage to take a week's holiday during term time, so that I could return to my teenage habits and play it by myself for hours on end. But it's been two years. If I want to play this game - or any massive game - I've got to try to fit it into the life that I actually have, with the job and the two small kids and every other responsibility that gets in the way. Continue reading...
The streamer's surprisingly varied library and ad-supported model has allowed it to start out-performing its far glossier, and more expensive, rivalsThere's a reason so many websites dedicate reams of virtual pages to the question of whether a brand-new movie is on Netflix, and when it might turn up there. For many casual viewers, the biggest streaming site is more or less synonymous with streaming itself; even big brand names like Disney+, no-longer-HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ are basically playing for second place. But at some point, they might need to concede that it's really a battle for third at best: last month, all of those aforementioned glossy non-Netflix services were out-viewed by Tubi.While fancier streaming services like Netflix and Prime Video have been experimenting with ad-supported versions in order to juice revenues (whether from cheaper ad-bearing subscriptions, hoping customers will pay more to avoid ads, or money from the ads themselves), Tubi offers a rotating, ad-supported lineup of movies and TV shows at the unbeatable price of zip. It's a free service that doesn't require so much as a sign-in. (I know this firsthand: I've been a regular Tubi user for years, and have yet to create an actual account.) Tubi combines the excited browsing of the old video store experience, the instant-gratification appeal of Netflix, and the old-fashioned channel-flipping of cable, where everyone once accepted the built-in ad breaks that came with movie-watching. Apparently, viewers don't mind introducing a little retro into their streaming experiences; Tubi is still growing in viewership and ad revenue. In its most recent quarter, the latter was up by 22%. (According to the CEO, the service isn't yet making money, but growth in such a competitive and capricious industry is still notable.) Continue reading...
Apple rolled out a feature highly requested by both disabled users and podcast creators. Why did it take so long?Ren Shelburne was fed up with trying to listen to popular podcast episodes her friends recommended. Shelburne, a photographer with partial hearing loss and an auditory processing condition, remembers struggling to finish a particular episode. It was a specific type of show: too many talking heads, complicated overlapping dialogue and, until recently, no transcription. Those I'm just so lost on because there's just too much going on at once," Shelburne says. She couldn't follow along, so she couldn't discuss the show with her friends. Podcasts are such a big part of pop culture and media at this point. I want to be able to be a part of that conversation."Weekly podcast listenership in the United States has more than quadrupled in the past decade, according to Pew Research. For some, though, the medium still feels inaccessible. Continue reading...
A South Australian museum honours the man who changed the way dentistry was done on a global scale'In medieval Europe, barber-surgeons might cut your hair, shave your face, do a bit of blood-letting and tend to a broken limb.They might also pull a tooth out with a pelican" - a crude beak-like shank - or lever it out with an iron tooth key". By the 17th century they might just knock it out with a steel punch elevator. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier and Charlie Lindlar on (#6N5G9)
The England defender shares his life story, lessons and secrets to success in a new BBC series. Plus: five of the best tech podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up herePack One Bag
Max Tegmark argues that the downplaying is not accidental and threatens to delay, until it's too late, the strict regulations neededBig tech has succeeded in distracting the world from the existential risk to humanity that artificial intelligence still poses, a leading scientist and AI campaigner has warned.Speaking with the Guardian at the AI Summit in Seoul, South Korea, Max Tegmark said the shift in focus from the extinction of life to a broader conception of safety of artificial intelligence risked an unacceptable delay in imposing strict regulation on the creators of the most powerful programs. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian